The Journey to The West

Anthony C. Yu is the Carl Darling Buck Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in the Humanities and
Professor Emeritus of Religion and Literature in the Divinity School; also in the Departments of
Comparative Literature, East Asian Languages and Civilizations, and English Language and Literature, and
the Committee on Social Thought. His scholarly work focuses on comparative study of both literary and
religious traditions.

Publication of this volume was made possible by a grant from the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for
International Scholarly Exchange (USA).

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 2012 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. Published 2012.
Printed in the United States of America

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-97131-5 (cloth)
ISBN-13: 978-0-226-97132-2 (paper)
ISBN-13: 978-0-226-97140-7 (e-book)
ISBN-10: 0-226-97131-7 (cloth)
ISBN-10: 0-226-97132-5 (paper)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Wu, Cheng'en, ca. 1500–ca. 1582, author.
[Xi you ji. English. 2012]
The journey to the West / translated and edited by Anthony C. Yu. — Revised edition.

pages ; cm
Summary: The story of Xuanzang, the monk who went from China to India in quest of Buddhist
scriptures.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
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97143-8 (v. 4 : e-book) 1. Xuanzang, ca. 596–664—Fiction. I. Yu, Anthony C., 1938–, translator, editor. II.
Title.
PL2697.H75E5 2012
895.1'346—dc23

2012002836

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

REVISED EDITION Volume I

The Journey to the West

Translated and Edited by Anthony C. Yu

The University of Chicago Press Chicago & London

FOR Priscilla & Christopher

(Daodejing 41)

The superior student who hears about
the Way practices it diligently.
The middling student who hears about
the Way now keeps it and now loses it.
The inferior student who hears about
the Way laughs at it loudly;
If he did not laugh, it would have
fallen short of the Way.

Die Sprache drükt niemals etwas
vollständig aus, sondern hebt nur
ein ihr hervorstechend scheinen-
des Merkmal hervor.

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE,

“Darstellung der Antiken Rhetorik”

Language never expresses something
fully, but only highlights some
significant characteristic feature.

Contents

Preface to the Revised Edition
Preface to the First Edition
Abbreviations
Introduction

1. The divine root conceives, its source revealed;
Mind and nature nurtured, the Great Dao is born.
2. Fully awoke to Bodhi’s wondrous truths;
He cuts off Māra, returns to the root, and joins Primal Spirit.
3. Four Seas and a Thousand Mountains all bow to submit;
From Ninefold Darkness ten species’ names are removed.
4. Appointed a BanHorse, could he be content?
Named Equal to Heaven, he’s still not appeased.
5. Disrupting the Peach Festival, the Great Sage steals elixir;
With revolt in Heaven, many gods would seize the fiend.
6. Guanyin, attending the banquet, inquires into the cause;
The Little Sage, exerting his power, subdues the Great Sage.
7. From the Eight Trigrams Brazier the Great Sage escapes;
Beneath the Five Phases Mountain, Mind Monkey is still.
8. Our Buddha makes scriptures to impart ultimate bliss;
Guanyin receives the decree to go up to Chang’an.
9. Chen Guangrui, going to his post, meets disaster;
Monk River Float, avenging his parents, repays his roots.
10. The Old Dragon King’s foolish schemes transgress Heaven’s decrees;
Prime Minister Wei’s letter seeks help from an official of the dead.
11. Having toured the Underworld, Taizong returns to life;
Having presented melons and fruits, Liu Quan marries again.
12. The Tang emperor, firmly sincere, convenes a Grand Mass;
Guanyin, in epiphany, converts Gold Cicada.
13. In the den of tigers, the Gold Star brings deliverance;
At Double-Fork Ridge, Boqin detains the monk.
14. Mind Monkey returns to the Right;

The Six Robbers vanish from sight.
15. At Serpent Coil Mountain, the gods give secret protection;
At Eagle Grief Stream, the Horse of the Will is reined.
16. At Guanyin Hall the monks plot for the treasure;
At Black Wind Mountain a monster steals the cassock.
17. Pilgrim Sun greatly disturbs the Black Wind Mountain;
Guanshiyin brings to submission the bear monster.
18. At Guanyin Hall the Tang Monk leaves his ordeal;
At Gao Village the Great Sage casts out the monster.
19. At Cloudy Paths Cave, Wukong takes in Eight Rules;
At Pagoda Mountain, Tripitaka receives the Heart Sūtra.
20. At Yellow Wind Ridge the Tang Monk meets adversity;
In mid-mountain, Eight Rules strives to be first.
21. The Vihārapālas prepare lodging for the Great Sage;
Lingji of Sumeru crushes the wind demon.
22. Eight Rules fights fiercely at the Flowing-Sand River;
Mokṣa by order receives Wujing’s submission.
23. Tripitaka does not forget his origin;
The Four Sages test the priestly mind.
24. At Long Life Mountain the Great Immortal detains his old friend;
At Five Villages Abbey, Pilgrim steals the ginseng fruit.
25. The Zhenyuan Immortal gives chase to catch the scripture monk;
Pilgrim Sun greatly disturbs Five Villages Abbey.

Notes
Index

Preface to the Revised Edition

A twofold purpose motivated my decision in 1969 to attempt a plenary English
translation of The Journey to the West. On the matter of literary form, I wanted
my version to rectify the distorted picture provided by Arthur Waley’s justly
popular abridgment (i.e., Monkey, Folk Novel of China by Wu Ch’êng-ên), which
regrettably excised all poetic segments and cut out or revised prose passages at
will. I felt strongly that it was high time that a classic Chinese novel like the one
in question, though of extraordinary length and complexity, should be read in its
entirety and not in bits and pieces. On the matter of the novel’s understanding
and critical interpretation, I wanted to redress an imbalance of emphasis
championed by Dr. Hu Shi, who provided the Waley volume with the following
observation: “[F]reed from all kinds of allegorical interpretations by Buddhist,
Taoist, and Confucianist commentators, Monkey is simply a book of good
humor, profound nonsense, good-natured satire, and delightful entertainment”
(Monkey, p. 5). Many other Chinese scholars for most of the twentieth century
shared this view. My own encounter with the text since childhood, under the
kind and skillful tutelage of my late grandfather, who used the novel as a
textbook for teaching me Chinese during the years of the Sino-Japanese war, had
long convinced me that this work was nothing if not one of the world’s most
finely wrought literary allegories. The past four decades of studying, translating,
and teaching it at the University of Chicago have also made me a happy witness
to new directions in its scholarly research and interpretation. The persistent
efforts of Japanese, European, American, and Chinese scholars—in diaspora and
on the mainland during the last two decades—have joined to enlarge
dramatically our understanding of the text’s sources and religious context,
especially those belonging to the Daoist religion since the late Tang.

Completed in 1983, the first full-length English translation of the novel
spawned its own ironies. No sooner had all four volumes appeared than friends
and colleagues far and near protested their unwieldy length, for general readers
and for classroom usage. After years of resistance to pleas for a shorter edition, I
decided, when approaching retirement in 2005, that an abridged version was
indeed needed for classroom and readers’ needs. The proposed text of about
thirty-five chapters would (1) convert the old Wade-Giles system of
romanization to the now globally accepted Hanyu Pinyin system for all Chinese
names, locales, and terms; (2) remove most scholarly footnotes and all Chinese
texts; (3) provide a new and very brief introduction for general readers; and (4)

include minor corrections of rhetoric and vocabulary where needed. The one-
volume edition, The Monkey and the Monk, An Abridgment of The Journey to
the West, was published in 2006 by the University of Chicago Press.

Production of this abridged version, paradoxically, made me realize further the
endless effort of literary translation, in some ways analogous to a performer’s
varied readings of a familiar music score. The linguistic signs or musical
notations remain the same, but the understanding of them may greatly alter. On
the matter of tempo alone, a comparison of Glenn Gould’s recordings of J.S.
Bach’s “The Complete Goldberg Variations” in 1955 and 1981 yields
illuminating differences. My abridgment in every aspect (shorter introduction,
simplified notes, emendations) certainly betokens awareness and assumptions of
new knowledge. The first full-length edition, in turn, now displays quite a few
pockets of datedness. I resolved that I would devote my new-found “leisure” in
retirement to attempt a major and complete overhaul of the first edition. The
principal objectives, consistent with, but not entirely identical to, those of the
abridged volume, would be to (1) convert the entire romanization system to
Pinyin; (2) restore and update or augment, where necessary, all scholarly
annotations; (3) provide a major restatement of the introduction that, apart from
providing basic information about the novel, would study the most important
new scholarship on literary issues, religious traditions (especially on identified
sources in the Buddhist and Daoist Canons and in extracanonical materials), and
modes of interpretation; and (4) correct or emend both prose and poetic
segments of the translation to make semantics and prosody more concise.
Because the five pilgrims in the novel, like characters in fiction of another
language (e.g., Russian), have multiple names, I have made uniform the way I
translate them. Formal names and surnames are romanized (e.g., Chen
Xuanzang, Sun Wukong). Informal names or nicknames become direct
translations (e.g., Pilgrim for the Chinese “Xingzhe” [disciple or acolyte], Eight
Rules for “Bajie,” a change in the perjorative title for Monkey from the
romanized “Bimawen” to “BanHorsePlague”).1 My hope is that this revised
version, like volumes of the Arden Shakespeare, Third Series, or Dorothy L.
Sayer’s The Divine Comedy, will last for some time as a teaching edition.

The timely award of an Emeriti Fellowship by the Mellon Foundation in 2006
provided immense encouragement and assistance for the initial stage of technical
work (scanning the four volumes and rendering the two thousand-plus pages in
free text format), purchase of needed equipment and materials, and some travel
to different libraries and centers. Professor Martha Roth (dean of humanities at
the University of Chicago) and Professor Richard Rosengarten (dean of the
divinity school at the University of Chicago) have given generous help from the

beginning, facilitating expert and unfailing computer support from two units of
the university. I am grateful as well to the University of Chicago Press for its
receptiveness to my proposal for a revised edition.

Dr. Yuan Zhou, curator of Regenstein Library’s East Asian collections, and his
able staff members William Alspaugh, Eizaburo Okuizumi, and Qian Xiaowen,
have worked tirelessly to acquire needed materials far and near. As in the past,
the encyclopedic bibliographical expertise of Dr. Tailoi Ma, director of Princeton
University’s East Asian Library and the Gest Collection, continues to furnish
trusted guidance. Professor Lai Chi-Tim of the Chinese University of Hong
Kong gave invaluable help to my ongoing labor by installing personally, during
one of his visits, all available databases of Daoist scriptures into my computer.
Professor Richard G. Wang (University of Florida) and Professor Yang Li
(Shanghai University) provided diligent collaboration in tracking and identifying
comprehensively the Daoist sources for both poetry and prose cited in the novel.
Professor Nicholas Koss (Fu-jen University, Taiwan), Professor Qiancheng Li
(Louisiana State University), and Professor Ping Shao (Davidson College) have
showered me with their generous gifts of scholarly publications—of their own
and of others—that are crucial for my research.

In early 2009, my wife and I were privileged to make our first visit to
Australia where I served for a fortnight as Visiting Fellow at The China Institute
of Australia National University. I wish I could name every one of the faculty
and student colleagues whose extraordinary kindness and hospitality made that
journey indelibly memorable. The constraint of space notwithstanding, I must
register lasting gratitude to the faculty members of ANU College of Asia and the
Pacific—Geremie Barmé, Duncan Campbell, John Markham, Benjamin Penny,
and Richard Rigby—who offered constant friendship and intellectual
stimulation, especially for my continuing work of translation and revision.
Nathan Woolley, doctoral candidate at the college and executive assistant of the
institute, attended to our every need. The generosity of John Minford, a friend
and kindred spirit of more than three decades in things literary, linguistic, and
(discovered during this visit to Australia) musical, made the entire journey
possible. His and his wife Rachel’s hospitality not only helped erase the strain of
great distance between Canberra and Chicago, but it also allowed us to enjoy
several cherished meetings with Professor Liu Ts’un-yan before his passing a
few months later. My indebtedness to Professor Liu’s scholarship should be
apparent in the introduction and the notes studding this translation.

The final draft of the new, long introduction has benefited enormously from
the sort of attentive and astute reading that one may expect only from true and
generous friends, and this was bestowed by Professor Zhou Yiqun (Stanford

University), Professor Nathan Sivin (emeritus, University of Pennsylvania), and
Dr. Xu Dongfeng (now of Emory University). Their criticisms, corrections, and
suggested emendations have vastly improved the manuscript. Remaining faults
and errors are entirely my own. As I reach this phase of my project, my one
sadness comes from the realization that all readers of the revised edition will no
longer enjoy the rare art of the late Wen-ching Tsien (Mrs. T.H. Tsien), whose
peerless Chinese calligraphy ornamented many pages of the original four
volumes.

Portions of a recent essay, “The Formation of Fiction in The Journey to the
West,” Asia Major, third series, XXI/1 (2008): 15–44, were used in different
parts of the introduction by permission.

When I began work on the translation long ago, it was an early and ready
decision to dedicate the first volume to my wife and our only son. After more
than four decades, it is both privilege and pleasure to renew the dedication.

Anthony C. Yu
Chicago, 2011

Preface to the First Edition

Though The Journey to the West is one of the most popular works of fiction in
China since its first publication in the late sixteenth century, and though it has
been studied extensively in recent years by both Oriental and Western scholars
(notably Hu Shih, Lu Hsün, Chêng Chên-to, Ogawa Tamaki, Ōta Tatsuo, C.T.
Hsia, Liu Ts’un-yan, Sawada Mizuho, and Glen Dudbridge), a fully translated
text has never been available to Western readers, notwithstanding the appearance
in 1959 of what is reputed to be a complete Russian edition.1 Two early versions
in English (Timothy Richard, A Mission to Heaven, 1913, and Helen M. Hayes,
The Buddhist Pilgrim’s Progress, 1930) were no more than brief paraphrases and
adaptations. The French brought out in 1957 a two-volume edition which
presented a fairly comprehensive account of the prose passages, but it left much
of the poetry virtually untouched.2 It was, moreover, riddled with errors and
mistranslations. In 1964, George Theiner translated into English a Czech edition
which was also greatly abridged.3 This leaves us finally with the justly famous
and widely read version of Arthur Waley, published in 1943 under the
misleading title Monkey, Folk Novel of China.4 Waley’s work is vastly superior
to the others in style and diction, if not always in accuracy, but unfortunately it,
too, is a severely truncated and highly selective rendition.

Of the one hundred chapters in the narrative, Waley has chosen to translate
only chapters 1–15, 18–19, 22, 37–39, 44–49, and 98–100, which means that he
has included less than one-third of the original. Even in this attenuated form,
however, Waley’s version further deviates from the original by having left out
large portions of certain chapters (e.g., 10 and 19). What is most regrettable is
that Waley, despite his immense gift for, and magnificent achievements in, the
translation of Chinese verse, has elected to ignore the many poems—some 750
of them—that are structured in the narrative. Not only is the fundamental literary
form of the work thereby distorted, but also much of the narrative vigor and
descriptive power of its language which have attracted generations of Chinese
readers is lost. The basic reason for my endeavor here, in the first volume of
what is hoped to be a four-volume unabridged edition in English, is simply the
need for a version which will provide the reader with as faithful an image as
possible of this, one of the four or five lasting monuments of traditional Chinese
fiction.

My dependence on modern scholarship devoted to this work is apparent
everywhere in both the introduction and the translation itself. I have stressed,

however, in my discussion of the work those narrative devices and structural
elements which have received comparatively little attention from recent
commentators. For, in addition to being a work of comedy and satire masterfully
wrought, The Journey to the West appears to embody elements of serious
allegory derived from Chinese religious syncretism which any critical
interpretation of it can ill afford to ignore.

A small portion of the introduction first appeared as “Heroic Verse and Heroic
Mission: Dimensions of the Epic in the Hsi-yu chi,” Journal of Asian Studies 31
(1972): 879–97, while another segment was written as part of an essay,
“Religion and Allegory in the Hsi-yu chi,” for Persuasion: Critical Essays on
Chinese Literature, edited by Joseph S.M. Lau and Leo Lee (in preparation).

The commitment to so large an undertaking can hardly be kept without the
encouragement and support of friends both at the University of Chicago and
elsewhere. It has been my good fortune since my arrival at Chicago to have had
Nathan Scott as a teacher and a colleague. He is an unfailing and illuminating
guide in the area of literary theory and theological criticism, and my gratitude for
the sustaining friendship of Professor Scott and his wife for more than a decade
cannot be expressed in a few words. From the beginning, Dean Joseph Kitagawa
of the University of Chicago’s Divinity School has not only urged me to attempt
this translation, but has also faithfully provided thoughtful assistance which has
enabled me to carry forward, without too great disruption, each phase of research
and writing in the face of equally demanding academic and administrative
responsibilities. To Herlee Creel, Elder Olson, Mircea Eliade, Frank Reynolds,
James Redfield (all of Chicago), C.T. Hsia (Columbia University), Joseph Lau
(University of Wisconsin), and Giles Gunn (University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill), I must say that the warmth of their friendship and their enthusiasm
for the project have been a constant source of strength and inspiration. David
Roy has generously placed his superb library and his vast knowledge of Chinese
literature at my disposal; the many discussions with him have saved me from
several serious errors. David Grene has taught me, more by example than by
precept, a good deal about the art of translation. Portions of this volume have
also been read by D.C. Lau (University of London) and Nathan Sivin (MIT);
their searching criticisms and suggestions, along with those of an anonymous
reader, have decisively improved the manuscript.

I am indebted also to Philip Kuhn and Najita Tetsuo, past and present directors
of the Far Eastern Language and Area Center at the University, for making
available the needed funds at various stages of research. A grant by the Leopold
Schepp Foundation of New York in the summer of 1973 enabled me to visit
Japan and Taiwan to study the early editions of the narrative. The gracious

hospitality and stimulating conversations provided by Kubo Noritada (Tōyō
Bunka Kenkyūjo), Nakamura Kyoko (University of Tokyo), Tanaka Kenji
(Jinbun Kagak’u Kenkyūjo), and Abe Masao (Nara University) made my stay in
Japan unforgettable, though it was all too brief.

My thanks are due, too, to T.H. Tsien and his able staff at the Far Eastern
Library of the University of Chicago (Tai Wen-pei, Robert Petersen, Ma Tai-loi,
Ho Hoi-lap, and Kenneth Tanaka), who have offered me every assistance in the
acquisition of materials and in the investigation of texts, and to Mrs. T.H. Tsien,
whose elegant calligraphy has graced the pages of this edition. Araki Michio,
doctoral candidate at the Divinity School and my sometime research assistant,
has been invaluable in helping me read Japanese scholarship. Edmund Rowan,
doctoral candidate at the Department of Far Eastern Languages and
Civilizations, has proofread the entire typescript with meticulous care and
discerning criticisms. No brief statement is adequate to indicate the selfless and
painstaking labor of Mrs. Donna Guido and Miss Susan Hopkins in the
preparation of the manuscript. Finally, I owe the successful completion of this
first volume above all else to my wife and my young son. For their affectionate
exhortations, for their unswerving devotion to the translation, and for their
cheerful forbearance toward long stretches of obsessive work, the dedication
betokens only a fraction of my gratitude.

Abbreviations

Antecedents Glen Dudbridge, The “Hsi-yu chi”: A Study of Antecedents to the

Sixteenth-Century Chinese Novel (Cambridge, 1970)

Bodde Derk Bodde, Festivals in Classical China (Princeton and Hong

Kong, 1975)

BPZ Baopuzi , Neipian and Waipian. SBBY

BSOAS Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies

Campany Robert Ford Campany, To Live as Long as Heaven and Earth: A

Translation and Study of Ge Hong’s “Traditions of Divine

Transcendents” (Berkeley, 2002)

CATCL The Columbia Anthology of Traditional Chinese Literature, ed.

Victor Mair (New York, 1994)

CHC The Cambridge History of China, eds. Denis Twitchett and John K.

Fairbank (15 vols. in multiple book-length parts. Cambridge and

New York, 1978–2009)

CHCL The Columbia History of Chinese Literature, ed. Victor Mair (New

York, 2001)

CJ Anthony C. Yu, Comparative Journeys: Essays on Literature and

Religion East and West (New York, 2008)

CLEAR Chinese Literature: Essays Articles Reviews

CQ China Quarterly

DH Daoism Handbook, ed. Livia Kohn (Leiden, 2000)

DHBWJ Dunhuang bianwenji , ed. Wang Zhongmin (2

vols., Beijing, 1957)

DJDCD Daojiao da cidian , ed. Li Shuhuan (Taipei,

1981)

DJWHCD Daojiao wenhua cidian , ed. Zhang Zhizhe

(Shanghai, 1994)

DZ Zhengtong Daozang (36 vols. Reprinted by Wenwu,

1988). Second set of numbers in JW citations refers to volume and

page number.

ET The Encyclopedia of Taoism, ed. Fabrizio Pregadio (2 vols.,

London and New York, 2008)

FSZ Da Tang Da Ci’ensi Sanzang fashi zhuan ,

1592 comp. Huili and Yancong . T 50, #2053. Text cited is that

FXDCD printed in SZZSHB.
HFTWJ
HJAS Xinke chuxiang guanban dazi Xiyouji , ed.
HR
Herrmann Huayang dongtian zhuren . Fasc. rpr. of Jinling
Hu Shi
(1923) Shidetang edition (1592) in Guben xiaoshuo jicheng ,
Hucker
IC vols. 499–502 (Shanghai, 1990)
Isobe
j Foxue da cidian , comp. and ed., Ding Fubao
JA
JAOS (fasc. rpr. of 1922 ed. Beijing, 1988)
JAS
JCR Liu Ts’un-yan [Cunren] , Hefengtang wenji (3
JMDJCD
JW vols., Shanghai, 1991)

Lévy Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies

History of Religions

Albert Hermann, An Historical Atlas of China, new ed. (Chicago,

1966)

Hu Shi , “Xiyouji kaozheng ,” in Hu Shi wencun

(4 vols., Hong Kong, 1962), 2: 354–99

Charles O. Hucker, A Dictionary of Official Titles in Imperial

China (Stanford, 1985)

The Indiana Companion to Traditional Chinese Literature, ed. and

comp. William H. Nienhauser Jr. (Bloomington, IN, 1986)

Isobe Akira , Saiyūki keiseishi no kenkyū

(Tokyo, 1993)

juan

Journal asiatique

Journal of the American Oriental Society

Journal of Asian Studies

Journal of Chinese Religions

Jianming Daojiao cidian , comp. and ed., Huang

Haide et al., (Chengdu, 1991)

The Journey to the West (Refers only to the four-volume

translation of Xiyouji by Anthony C. Yu published by the

University of Chicago Press, 1977–1983, of which the present

volume is the first of four in a complete revised edition.)

André Lévy, trad., Wu Cheng’en, La Pérégrination vers l’Ouest,

Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (2 vols., Paris, 1991)

Li Li Angang Piping Xiyouji (2 vols., Beijing, 2004)

Little Stephen Little with Shawn Eichman, Daoism and the Arts of China
(Art Institute of Chicago, in association with University of
LSYYJK California Press, 2000)
LWJ
MDHYCH Lishi yuyan yanjiusuo jikan

Monkey “Xiyouji” yanjiu lunwenji (Beijing, 1957)

Ōta Gu Zhichuan , Mingdai Hanyu cihui yanjiu
Plaks
(Kaifeng, Henan, 2000)
Porkert
Monkey: Folk Novel of China by Wu Ch’eng-en, trans. Arthur
QSC Waley (London, 1943)

QTS Ōta Tatsuo , Saiyūki no kenkyū (Tokyo, 1984)
Saiyūki
Andrew H. Plaks, The Four Masterworks of the Ming Novel
SBBY (Princeton, 1987)
SBCK
SCC Manfred Porkert, The Theoretical Foundations of Chinese
Medicine: Systems of Correspondence (Cambridge, MA, 1974)
Schafer
Quan Songci , ed. Tang Guizhang (5 vols., 1965; rpr.
SCTH Tainan, 1975)
Soothill
Quan Tangshi (12 vols., 1966; rpr. Tainan, 1974)
SSJZS
SZZSHB Saiyūki , trans. Ōta Tatsuo and Torii Hisayasu

. Chūgoku koten bungaku taikei , 31–32 (2

vols., Tokyo, 1971)

Sibu beiyao

Sibu congkan

Joseph Needham et al., Science and Civilisation in China (7 vols.
in 27 book-length parts. Cambridge, 1954)

Edward H. Schafer, Pacing the Void: T’ang Approaches to the
Stars (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London, 1977)

Sancai tuhui (1609 edition)

A Dictionary of Chinese Buddhist Terms, comp. William Edward
Soothill and Lewis Hodus (rpr. 1934 ed. by London: Kegan Paul,
Trench, Trubner. Taipei, 1970)

Shisanjing zhushu (2 vols., Beijing, 1977)

Tang Xuanzang Sanzang zhuanshi huibian , ed.
Master Guangzhong (Taipei, 1988)

T Taishō shinshū dai-zōkyō , eds. Takakusu Junijirō

TC and Watanabe Kaikyoku (85 vols., Tokyo,

TP 1934)
TPGJ
TPYL The Taoist Canon: A Historical Companion to the “Daozang”,
Unschuld
Veith eds. Kristofer Schipper and Franciscus Verellen (3 vols., Chicago,
WCESWJ
XMGZ 2004)

XYJ T’oung Pao
XYJCD
XYJTY Taiping guangji , comp. and ed. Li Fang (5 vols., rpr.
XYJYJZL
XYJZLHB Tainan, 1975)
YYZZ
ZYZ Taiping yulan , comp. and ed. Li Fang (4 vols., Beijing,

1960)

Paul U. Unschuld, trans. and annotated, Nan-Ching: The Classic of

Difficult Issues (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London, 1986)

Ilza Veith, trans., The Yellow Emperor’s Classic of Internal

Medicine, new ed. (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London, 1972)

Wu Cheng’en shiwenji , ed. Liu Xiuye

(Shanghai, 1958).

Xingming guizhi , authorship attributed to an advanced

student of one Yin Zhenren , in Zangwai Daoshu

(36 vols., Chengdu, 1992–1994), 9: 506–95. For JW, I also consult

a modern critical edition published in Taipei, 2005, with a

comprehensive and learned set of annotations by Fu Fengying

. The citation from this particular edition will be

denominated as XMGZ-Taipei.

Wu Cheng’en , Xiyouji (Beijing: Zuojia chubanshe,

1954). Abbreviation refers only to this edition.

Xiyouji cidian , comp. and ed. Zeng Shangyan

(Zhengzhou, Henan, 1994)

Zheng Mingli , Xiyouji tanyuan (2 vols., 1982; rpr.

Taipei, 2003)

Xiyouji yanjiu zhiliao , ed. Liu Yinbo

(Shanghai, 1982)

“Xiyouji” zhiliao huibian (Zhongzhou, Henan,

1983)

Youyang zazu (SBCK edition)

Zhongyao zhi (4 vols., Beijing, 1959–1961).

Yang Yang Fengshi , Zhongguo zhengtong Daojiao da cidian
(2 vols., Taipei, 1989–1992) Yü Chün-fang Yü,

Kuan-yin: The Chinese Transformation of Avalokiteśvara (New
York, 2001)

ZHDJDCD Zhonghua Daojiao da cidian , ed. Hu Fuchen
et al. (Beijing, 1995)

Zhou Zhou Wei , Zhongguo bingqishi gao (Beijing,
1957)

Citations from all Standard Histories, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from

the Kaiming edition of Ershiwushi (9 vols., 1934; rpr. Taipei, 1959).

Citations of text with traditional or simplified characters follow format of

publications consulted.

Introduction

I HISTORICAL AND LITERARY ANTECEDENTS

The story of the late-Ming novel Xiyouji (The Journey to the West) is

loosely based on the famous pilgrimage of Xuanzang (596?–664), the monk

who went from China to India in quest of Buddhist scriptures. He was not the

first to have undertaken such a long and hazardous journey. According to a

modern scholar’s tabulations,1 at least fifty-four named clerics before him,

beginning with Zhu Shixing in 260 CE, had traveled westward both for

advanced studies and to fetch sacred writings, though not all of them had

reached the land of their faith. After Xuanzang, there were another fifty or so

pilgrims who made the journey, the last of whom was the monk Wukong ,

who stayed in India for forty years and returned in the year 789.2 Xuanzang’s

journey, therefore, was part of the wider movement of seeking the Dharma in the

West, which spanned nearly five centuries. His extraordinary achievements and

his personality, neither of which this novel attempts to depict literally, became

part of the permanent legacy of Chinese Buddhism. He was, by most accounts,

one of the best-known and most revered Buddhist monks.

Born probably in the year 596 in the province of Henan ,3 in Tangera

Chenliu county of Luozhou (now Goushi county ), Xuanzang,

whose secular surname was Chen and given name Wei , is described by his

biographers as having come from a family of fairly prominent officials. His

grandfather Chen Kang was erudite (professor more or less) in the School

for the Sons of the State (guozi boshi ), a moderately high rank.

Xuanzang’s father Chen Hui mastered the classics early and loved to affect

the appearance of a Confucian scholar. Xuanzang himself was reputed to have

been a precocious child. When he was but eight years old and reciting the

Classic of Filial Piety before his father, the young boy suddenly leapt to his feet

to tidy his clothes. As the reason for his abrupt action, the youth declared:

“Master Zeng [one of Confucius’s disciples] heard his teacher’s voice and rose

from his mat. How could Xuanzang sit still when he hears his father’s

teachings?”4 Despite this alleged practice of received virtue, the death of his

father two years later and the influence of an elder brother who was a Buddhist

monk already (Chen Su , religious name, Zhangjie ) might have led to

his joining the monastic community in the eastern Tang capital of Luoyang at

age thirteen. Even at this time he had developed a deep interest in the study of

Buddhist scriptures, and he later journeyed with his brother to the western

capital of Chang’an (today’s Xi’an ) to continue his studies with that
city’s eminent clerics.

Xuanzang grew up in a period of tremendous social and intellectual ferment in
Chinese history. Yang Jian (r. 581–604), the founding emperor of the Sui
dynasty, came to power in 581, and though the dynasty itself lasted less than
forty years (581–618), its accomplishments, in Arthur Wright’s words, were

prodigious and its effects on the later history of China were far-reaching. It represented one of those
critical periods in Chinese history . . . when decisions made and measures taken wrought a sharp break in
institutional development in the fabric of social and political life. The Sui reunified China politically after
nearly three hundred years of disunion; it reorganized and unified economic life; it made great strides in
the re-establishment of cultural homogeneity throughout an area where subcultures had proliferated for
over three centuries. Its legacy of political and economic institutions, of codified law and governmental
procedures, of a new concept of empire, laid the foundations for the great age of Tang which followed.5

It was also a time marked by the revival of religious traditions, for Sui Wendi

(Yang Jian) actively sought the support and sanction of all three religions—

Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism—to consolidate his empire, thus

reversing the persecutory policies of some of his predecessors in the Northern

Zhou dynasty and providing exemplary actions for the early Tang emperors in

the next dynasty.6 Though he might lack some of the personal piety of a previous

Buddhist emperor such as Liang Wudi (r. 502–49), Wendi himself was

unquestionably a devout believer whose imperial patronage gave to the Buddhist

community the kind of support, security, and stimulus for growth not unlike that

received by the Christian church under Constantine. This Chinese emperor

began a comprehensive program of constructing stūpas and enshrining sacred

relics in emulation of the Indian monarch Aśoka. He also established various

assemblies of priests to propagate the faith and study groups to promote sound

doctrines. Even allowing for some exaggerations in the Buddhist sources, it was

apparent that Buddhism, by the end of the Sui dynasty, had enjoyed remarkable

growth, as evidenced by the vast increase of converts, clerics, and temples

throughout the land.

That Xuanzang himself at an early age was very much caught up in the

intellectual activities spreading through his religious community at this time

could perhaps best be seen in the kind of training he received as a young acolyte.

His biographers mentioned specifically that after he first entered the Pure Land

Monastery in Luoyang, he studied with abandonment the Niepan jing

(Nirvāṇa Sūtra) and the She dasheng lun (Mahāyāna-saṁparigraha

śāstra) with two tutors (FSZ, j 1). These two works are significant to the extent

that they may shed light on part of the doctrinal controversy continuing for some

three centuries in Chinese Buddhism. A major Mahāyāna text, the Nirvāṇa

Sūtra, was translated three times: first by Faxian in collaboration with Buddha-

bhadra, then by Dharmakshema of Bei Liang in 421, and again by a group of

southern Chinese Buddhists led by Huiyan (363–443) in the Yuanjia era (424–

453). Its widespread appeal, particularly in the south, and its repeated

discussions can readily be attributed to the emphasis on a more inclusive concept

of enlightenment and salvation. According to Kenneth Ch’en, the Buddhists until

this time had been taught that there is no self in nirvāṇa. In this sūtra, however,

they are told that the Buddha possesses an immortal self, and that the final state

of nirvāṇa is one of bliss and purity enjoyed by the eternal self. Saṁsāra is thus

a pilgrimage leading to the final goal of union with the Buddha, and this

salvation is guaranteed by the fact that all living beings possess the Buddha-

nature. All living beings from the beginning of life participated in the Buddha’s

eternal existence, and thereby dignity is granted them as children of the

Buddha.7

On the other hand, the śāstra, though also a Mahāyānist text, belongs to the

Yogācāra school of Indian idealism, and it stresses what may be called a more

elitist view of salvation.8 In the biography, Xuanzang is depicted as not only a

specially able exponent of this text, but also as deeply vexed by the question of

whether all men, or only part of humanity, could attain Buddhahood. It was to

resolve this particular question as well as other textual and doctrinal perplexities

that he decided to make what would become the famous pilgrimage to India.

Years later, when he was touring the land of the faith, he prayed before a famous

image of Guanyin (Avalokiteśvara) on his way to Bengal, and his three petitions

were: to have a safe and easy journey back to China, to be reborn in Lord

Maitreya’s palace as a result of the knowledge he gained, and to be personally

assured that he would become a Buddha since the holy teachings claimed that

not all men had the Buddha-nature.9

As he studied with various masters in China during his youth, Xuanzang

became convinced that unless the encyclopedic Yogā-cārya-bhūmi śāstra (Yujia

shidi lun ), the foundational text of this school of Buddhism, became

available, the other idealistic texts could not be properly understood. He resolved

to go to India, but the application made by him and other Buddhist companions

to the imperial court for permission to travel was refused. “At this time,”

declares his official biography, “the state’s governance was new and its frontiers

did not reach far. The people were prohibited from going to foreign domains.”

The second emperor of the Tang dynasty, Taizong (r. 627–649), had just

assumed his title, but this man had usurped the throne by ambushing and

murdering his two brothers and possibly even his own father, incidents

unmistakably recalled in the novelistic episode on the emperor’s tour of the

underworld (chapter 11).10 Because the slain brothers were stationed near the

western frontier, loyal troops likely became restive when news of their

commanders’ death had reached them. The court’s refusal to permit free passage

to the western territories was thus understandable and received immediate and

unquestioned obedience by Xuanzang’s companions. Xuanzang, however, was

of a different cast of mind. Emboldened by an auspicious dream in which he saw

himself crossing a vast ocean treading on sprouting lotus leaves and uplifted to

the peak of the sacred Sumeru Mountain by a powerful breeze, the young priest

defied the imperial prohibition and set out, probably late in 627, by joining in

secret a merchant caravan. This one exercise of personal religious commitment

had, in fact, rendered the youthful pilgrim guilty of high treason, liable to

immediate execution if caught by the authorities, but the transgressive and

highly dangerous border crossing to exit Tang territory was successful.11

Sustaining appalling obstacles and hardships, Xuanzang traversed Turfan,

Darashar, Tashkent, Samarkand, Bactria, Kapisa, and Kashmir, until he finally

reached the Magadha Kingdom of mid-India (now Bodhgaya) around 631. Here

he studied with the aged Silabhadra (Jiexian ) in the great Nālandā

Monastery for five years—in three different periods separating his wide travels

throughout the land of his faith. He visited many sacred sites, and, according to

his biographers, expounded the Dharma before kings, priests, and laymen.

Heretics and brigands alike were converted by his preaching, and scholastics

were defeated in debates with him. To honor him, Indian Buddhists bestowed on

him the titles Mahāyāna-deva ( , the Celestial Being of the Great

Vehicle) and Mokṣa-deva ( , a Celestial Being of Deliverance). After

sixteen years, in 643, he began his homeward trek, taking the wise precaution

while en route in Turfan the following year of requesting in writing an imperial

pardon for leaving China without permission.12 Readily absolved by Taizong,

who often owed his own rise to power to the decisive support of Buddhists on

several occasions, Xuanzang arrived at the capital, Chang’an, in the first month

of 645, bearing some 657 items (bu) of Buddhist scriptures. The emperor was

away in the eastern capital, Luoyang, preparing for his campaign against

Koguryŏ (the modern Korea).

In the following month, Xuanzang proceeded to Luoyang, where emperor and

pilgrim finally met. More interested in “the rulers, the climate, the products, and

the customs in the land of India to the west of the Snowy Peaks” (FSZ, j 6) than

in the fine points of doctrinal development, Taizong was profoundly impressed

by the priest’s vast knowledge of foreign cultures and peoples. The emperor’s

appointive offer was declined; instead, Xuanzang declared his resolve to devote

his life to the translation of sūtras and śāstras. The monk was first installed in the

Hongfu Monastery and subsequently in the Ci’en Monastery of

Chang’an, the latter edifice having been built by the crown prince (later, emperor

Gaozong) in memory of his mother. Supported by continuous royal favors and a

large staff of some of the most able Buddhist clerics of the empire, Xuanzang

spent the next nineteen years of his life translating and writing. By the time he

died in 664, at the age of about seventy, he had completed translations of

seventy-five scriptures in 1,347 scroll-volumes (juan), including the lengthy

Yogācārya-bhūmi śāstra for which Taizong wrote in commendation the famous

Shengjiao xu (Preface to the Holy Religion). Among Xuanzang’s own

writings, his Cheng weishi lun (Treatise on the Establishment of the

Consciousness-Only System) and the Da Tang Xiyuji (The Record of

the Great Tang’s Western Territories) were the best known, the first being an

elaborate and subtle exposition of the Trimsika by Vasubandhu and a synthesis of

its ten commentaries, and the latter a descriptive and anecdotal travelogue

sometimes called the first Chinese work of geography dictated to the disciple

Bianji (d. 649).

This brief sketch of Xuanzang and account of his life, as told by his

biographers, have much of the engaging blend of facts and fantasies, of myth

and history, out of which fictions are made. There should be no surprise,

therefore, that his exploits were soon incorporated into the biographical sections

(liezhuan) of such a standard dynastic history as the Jiu Tangshu , although

even this brief entry of no more than 362 characters was excised later by the

poet-official and ardent Confucian Ouyang Xiu (1007–72) in the Xin

Tangshu , his authorized revision of canonical history.13 Despite this early

instance of political censorship, the story of Xuanzang’s life was celebrated

repeatedly by both classical and demotic literary writings. Visual and

iconographic depictions of this specific but imagined pilgrimage also could be

found on wall murals and relief sculptures of varying geographical sites (some

found on or near the northwestern silk route, while others in the southeastern

coastal region), the earliest ones possibly dating to the late Tang.14 Yet, it must

be pointed out that the Xuanzang story—as finally told in the hundred-chapter

narrative published in 1592 and titled Xiyouji (literally, the Record of the

Westward Journey) of which the present work is a complete translation—and the

historical Xuanzang have only the most tenuous relation. In nearly a millennium

of evolution, the story of Tang Sanzang (Tripitaka, the honorific name of

Xuanzang to commemorate his acquisition of Buddhist scriptures) and his

journey to the West has been told by both pen and mouth and through a variety

of literary forms which have included the short poetic tale, the drama, and finally

the fully developed narrative using both prose and verse. In this long process of

development, the theme of the pilgrimage for scriptures is never muted, but

added to this basic constituent of the story are numerous features which have

more in common with folktales, legends, religious lore, and creative fiction than

with history. The account of a courageous monk’s undertaking, motivated by

profound religious zeal and commitment in defiance of imperial proscription, is

actually displaced and eventually transformed into a tale of supernatural deeds

and fantastic adventures, of mythic beings and animal spirits, of fearsome battles

with monsters and miraculous deliverances from dreadful calamities. How all

this came about is a study in itself, but a pioneering effort had been undertaken

by Glen Dudbridge in his authoritative The Hsi-yu chi: A Study of Antecedents to

the Sixteenth-Century Chinese Novel.15 Supplemented by later scholarship

written in Chinese and other languages, I shall review briefly only the most

important literary versions of the westward journey prior to the late Ming

narrative before proceeding to discuss the cultural materials specific to the

hundred-chapter novel.

Between the time of the historical Xuanzang and the first literary version of

his journey for which we have solid documentary evidence, there are a few

scattered indications that fragments of the pilgrim’s story and exploits were

working their way already into late Tang poetry and anecdotal writings. In the

biography, the monk is represented as having a special fondness for the Heart

Sūtra (the Prajñāpāramitāhṛdaya), a very short text which he himself later

translated, for it was by reciting it and by calling upon Guanyin that he found

deliverance from dying of thirst and from hallucinations in the desert (FSZ, j

1).16 By the time of the Taiping guangji , the encyclopedic anthology of

anecdotes and miscellaneous tales compiled in 976–83, the brief account of

Xuanzang contained therein already included the motif of the pilgrim’s special

relation with the sūtra. There we are told that an old monk, his face covered with

sores and his body with pus and blood, was the one who had transmitted this

sūtra to the pilgrim, for whom, “when he recited it, the mountains and the

streams became traversable, and the roads were made plain and passable; tigers

and leopards vanished from sight; demons and spirits disappeared. He thus

reached the land of Buddha” (TPGJ, j 92, 10: 606). During the next century,

Ouyang Xiu recalled drinking one night at the Shouling Monastery in

Yangzhou. He was told by an old monk there that when the place was used as a

traveling palace by the Later Zhou emperor Shizong (r. 954–59), all the murals

were destroyed except an exquisite one on one wall that depicted the story of

Xuanzang’s journey in quest of the scriptures.17

These two references, while clearly pointing to popular interest in the story,

provide us with scant information on how this story has been told. The first

representation of a distinctive tale with certain characteristic figures and

episodes appears, as Dudbridge puts it, “almost without warning.” Two texts

preserved in Japanese collections, which contain minor linguistic discrepancies

but which recount essentially the same story, have been dated by most scholars

as products of the thirteenth century: Xindiao Da Tang Sanzang Fashi qujingji

(The Newly Printed Record of the Procurement of

Scriptures by the Master of the Law, Tripitaka, of the Great Tang) and the Da

Tang Sanzang qujing shihua (The Poetic Tale of the

Procurement of Scriptures by Tripitaka of the Great Tang). Originally belonging

to the monastery Kōzanji northwest of Kyoto, these texts finally gained

public attention upon their publication earlier in the twentieth century.18

As some of the earliest examples of printed popular fiction in China, the texts

have deservedly attracted widespread scholarly interest and scrutiny, even

though they in no way can be considered the “blueprint” for emplotting the

hundred-chapter novel published some four centuries later.19 As far as we know

at present, they may have been the first to depict Xuanzang’s pilgrimage as

fiction, inaugurating the imaginative elaboration of the Tripitaka legend. The

brief poetic tale of seventeen sections (with section 1 missing in both texts),

narrated by prose interlaced with verse written mostly in the form of the

heptasyllabic quatrain or jueju , tells of Xuanzang’s journey through such

mythic and fantastic regions as the palace of Mahābrahmā Devarāja, the Long

Pit and the Great Serpent Range, the Nine Dragon Pool, the kingdoms of

Guizimu, Women, Poluo, and Utpala Flowers, and the Pool of Wangmu (Queen

Mother of the West) before his arrival in India. After procuring some 5,048 juan

of Buddhist scriptures, Xuanzang returns to the Xianglin Monastery, where he is

taught the Heart Sūtra by the Dīpaṁkara Buddha. On his way back to the region

of Shaanxi, the pilgrim avenges the crime of a stepmother’s murder of her son by

splitting open a large fish and restoring the child to life. When he reaches the

capital, the priest is met by the emperor and given the title “Master Tripitaka,”

after which the pilgrim and his companions are conveyed by celestial vehicles to

Heaven.

A primitive version of the Xiyouji story hardly to be compared with the scope

and complexity of the hundred-chapter narrative, the poetic tale nonetheless

vindicates its importance by introducing a number of themes or episodes

expanded and developed in subsequent literary treatments of the same story.
These themes may be summarized as follows:

1. The Monkey Disciple or Acolyte (Skt. ācārin, hou xingzhe ) as protector and guide of

Xuanzang (section 2 and passim) who gains the title Great Sage (Dasheng ) at the end (section 17).

2. The gifts of the Mahābrahmā Devarāja: an invisible hat, a golden-ringed priestly staff, and an almsbowl
(section 2; cf. JW, chapters 8 and 12, for the gifts to Xuanzang from Buddha and from the emperor).

3. The snow-white skeleton (section 6; cf. JW, chapters 27–31, the Cadaver Monster? or chapter 50).

4. Monkey’s defeat of the White Tiger spirit through invasion of its belly (section 6; cf. JW, chapters 59,
75, and 82, for similar feats of Monkey).

5. The Deep-Sand God as possible ancestor of Sha Monk of the Ming narrative (section 8; JW, chapter
22).20

6. The Kingdom of Guizimu (section 9; cf. scene 12 of the twenty-four-act drama also titled

Xiyouji, and chapter 42 of JW).21

7. The Kingdom of Women, where Mañjuśrī and Samantabhadra appear as temptresses (section 10; cf. JW,
chapters 23, 53–54).

8. The reference to Monkey’s theft of immortal peaches and his capture by Wangmu (section 11; cf. JW,
chapter 5).

9. The reference to the ginseng fruit and its childlike features (section 11; cf. JW, chapters 24–26).

Among the themes which appeared in the Song poetic tale, the introduction of
a Monkey acolyte or disciple as the human pilgrim’s lasting companion surely
ranks as a highly significant one. Disguised as a white-robed scholar that
Xuanzang met on the way, this simian figure anticipates in some ways the
powerful, resourceful, and heroic Sun Wukong of XYJ. The place that Monkey
claims to be his home is mentioned in exactly the same manner again in the
much later twenty-four-scene drama version of the story (the Purple-Cloud Cave
of the Flower-Fruit Mountain), while XYJ retains only the name of the mountain
and bestows a new name (Water Curtain) to the cave dwelling. Throughout the
tale, he is presented as both a past delinquent and a dedicated guardian who will
deliver Xuanzang from his preordained afflictions during the pilgrimage.

In the biography of the historical monk, he was not accompanied on his
journey by any supernatural beings, let alone animal figures. The tantalizingly
cryptic reference (“Procurement of scriptures one owes to a monkey acolyte

”) in a line of poetry by the Song poet, Liu Kezhuang (1187–
1269) on Buddists and Daoists, gives an early hint of the animal figure’s
association with a scripture pilgrimage, but it neither explains the reason of this
association nor identifies Xuanzang as the pilgrim.22 The carved monkey figure
located at the Kaiyuan si of Quanzhou (Zayton), completed some
time in 1237, is also, according to the description of G. Ecke and P.
Demiéville,23 identified by that temple tradition as Sun Wukong, though the
depiction differs significantly from the novelistic figure’s clothing and

weapons.24 Neither of these “sources,” however, really explains how a popular

religious folk hero such as Xuanzang has come to acquire this animal attendant,

who gains steadily in popularity in subsequent literary accounts until finally, in

the hundred-chapter narrative, he almost completely overshadows his master.

It is to the search for the possible origin of this fascinating figure and the

reasons for his associations with, and prominence within, the Tripitaka legend

that Dudbridge devotes all of his investigation in the second half of his study.

The literary works which he examines in detail range from early prose tales of a

white ape figure (the Tang Baiyuan zhuan and the vernacular mid-Ming

short story Chen Xunjian Meiling shiqiji ),25 to Ming dramas

such as the Erlang shen suo Qitian Dasheng , Erlang shen zuishe

suomojing , Menglie Nezha san bianhua , Guankou

Erlang zhan jianjiao , and the Longji shan yeyuan ting jing

.26 None of these works, however, can be shown decisively to be a

“source” for the derivation of the later full-length novel. As Dudbridge sees the

matter, the essential role of the white ape emerging from the tales under

consideration is one of abductor and seducer of women, a characteristic foreign

to the Monkey of the Xiyouji. In his opinion, “Tripitaka’s disciple commits

crimes which are mischievous and irreverent, but the white ape is from first to

last a monstrous creature which has to be eliminated. The two acquire superficial

points of similarity when popular treatments of the respective traditions, in each

case of Ming date, coincide in certain details of nomenclature.”27 That might

well have been the case, or it might have been that there were two related

traditions concerning the monkey figure: one which emphasizes the monkey as a

demon, evil spirit, and recreant in need of suppression by the warrior god Erlang

or Naṭa as in the Qitian Dasheng plays, and one which portrays the monkey as

capable of performing religious deeds as in the tingjing accounts. Both strands of

the tradition might in turn feed into the evolving Xiyouji cycle of stories.28

In addition to these literary texts, the figure of Wuzhiqi , the water fiend,

has provided many scholars with a prototype of Sun Wukong, mainly because

he, too, was a monster whose delinquent behavior led to his imprisonment

beneath a mountain, first by the legendary King Yu, the conqueror of the

primeval flood in China, and then again by Guanyin.29 However, Dudbridge

points out that such a theory involves the identification of Sun Wukong as

originally a water demon and his early association with the Erlang cult of

Sichuan, neither of which assumptions finds apparent support in the Kōzanji

text.30 It may be added that Wuzhiqi, though certainly known to the novel’s

author (he was referred to in chapter 66 as the Water Ape Great Sage [Shuiyuan

dasheng ]), has been kept quite distinct from the monkey hero. One of

Sun Wukong’s specific weaknesses consistently emphasized in XYJ is that he

loses much of his power and adroitness once he enters water (e.g., chapter 22).

On the other hand, the novelistic simian hero’s one most positive association

with water also links him distantly to Wuzhiqi, because the mighty iron rod that

has become part of Sun Wukong’s trademark identity since chapter 3 is

originally a divine ruler by which King Yu fixed the proper depths of rivers and

seas when subduing the flood.

If indigenous materials prove insufficient to establish with any certainty the

origin of the monkey hero, does it imply that one must follow Hu Shi’s

provocative conjectures and look for a prototype in alien literature?31 An

affirmative answer to this question seems inviting, since the universally popular

Hanumat adventures in the Rāmāyaṇa (hereafter R)32 story might have found

their way into China through centuries of mercantile and religious traffic with

India. Furthermore, the composition attributed to Vālmīki is known to have

reached the Dunhuang texts in the form of Tibetan and Khotanese manuscripts.

Subsequent research by both Chinese and European scholars, whom Dudbridge

follows, has opined that early works of Chinese popular literature, whether in

narrative or dramatic form, seem to contain no more than fragmentary and

modified traces of the R epic in known Buddhist writings. Wu Xiaoling, who has

canvassed a number of probable allusions to various episodes and incidents of R

in extant Chinese Buddhist scriptures, has also argued for the improbability of

the XYJ author having seen any of these.33 The often noted similarities between

Hanumat and the Monkey of the narrative (courage and prowess in battle,

extraordinary magic powers that include rapid aerial flights and transformations,

the use of an iron rod as a weapon, and the tendency to attack their enemies by

gaining entrance into their bellies) perhaps point to a “fund of shared motifs,”34

but Dudbridge’s cautious suggestion is that well-attested evidence of the

intervening stages was lacking to establish influence or derivation.

More recent scholarship, however, has steadily recognized that that “fund of

shared motifs,” a rather large one, cannot be so easily ignored either. First,

interesting textual and geographical details from other sources may indicate the

convergence of Chinese and Indian motifs “in a body of monkey lore”

surrounding the Hangzhou monastery, Lingyin Si , because they tell of

resident monks who, like their non-Chinese counterparts, at one time raised

monkeys. Monkeys reared in the Lingyin Monastery are said to have the

surname Sun, using exactly the same pun on homophones of the graph sun (i.e.,

and ) as in the novel (chapter 1) with respect to the pilgrim’s eldest disciple,

while monkeys brought up in India’s Spirit Vulture Mountain are said to have

memorized and been able to recite the Triśaraṇa formula of taking refuge

in the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Saṅgha. The stories not only reinforce and

perpetuate the striking theme of pious simians listening to scriptural exposition (

) favored and celebrated by Chinese literati and painters on account of the

white gibbon’s “monogramous family life, his solitary habits,” and mournful

cries that evoke and elicit weeping, but even more significantly, but they also

specifically associate the Lingyin Mountain with the attributed abode of Buddha

in India, the Spirit Garuḍa Peak (Sk. Gṛdhra-kūṭa).35 What is important

about this group of legend and story is its exaltation of monkeys and the varying

species such as gibbons, macaques, chimpanzees, and apes—along with other

creatures like lions, peacocks, elephants, bears, bulls, and fishes—as beings

capable of responding to Buddhist evangelistic speech and action by which the

animals may even find enlightenment. This Chinese “religious” monkey

fashioned in narrative, poetic, dramatic, and visual representation may be

magically potent, mischievous, and even transgressive, but it need not be a

figure so confirmed in evil that he is always to be extirpated. Most noteworthily,

the sentient creature’s depicted action irrefutably constitutes one fundamental

element of Indian religiosity encompassing both Hinduism and Buddhism, in

which a huge variety of known animals and mythical beasts has been pressed

into ritual service to the gods.36 Such a tendency might also have found

demonstrable adaptation in the Daoist pantheon and the fiction thereof.37 By

contrast, the dominant Chinese cultrual tradition’s simian lore may preserve

some references to monkey-like creatures able to communicate in human speech,

but there is no known account of a monkey attending a lecture on the Classic of

Filial Piety or the Confucian Four Books.38 Indeed, the ritual theory articulated

by state-sponsored Confucianism was perfectly clear on what distinguished

human beings from animals: “A parrot can speak, but it does not cease being a

bird; an ape can speak, but it does not cease being a beast. If now a human being

does not observe ritual, is this person’s mind not beastly even if endowed with

the ability of speech? For only animals do not observe ritual” (Liji , chapter

1 in SSJZS 1: 1231).

The carved monkey figure of Quanzhou’s Buddhist temple, the different

versions of the violent and rebellious ape in the Wuzhiqi myth and other

dramatic accounts, the numerous textual representations of monkey fiends or

demons that that are worshipped as malevolent cult dieties in need of religious

exorcism,39 and the legend of the Lingyin Temple’s pious simians have lent

weight to Dudbridge’s own previous suggestion for associating an early (by late

Northern or early Southern Song) development of the XYJ story tradition with

China’s southeastern coastal region, in parts belonging to the modern Fujian

province.40 He cites as evidence a story from the Song collectanea of largely

“tales of the anomalous (zhiguai xiaoshuo ),” the Yijianzhi by

Hong Mai (1123–1202), that relates how a Monkey King , whose cultic

worship inflicted fever and frenzy upon the populace, was brought to submission

and also deliverance by the Buddhist elder Zongyan through his recitation in

Sanskrit “the dhāranī of the All-Compassionate ( ).”41 Both Dudbridge and

Isobe Akira’s subsequent discussion on additional textual sources of this tale and

a couple of other similar stories seem to have emphasized the linkage to XYJ

tradition primarily through the figure of a Monkey King.42 As I read the tale,

however, what is most striking are the means and meaning of salvific

pacification, since in the full-length novel, a recitation of dhāranī (spells, zhou

) is joined to the three fillets Buddha gave to Guanyin as weapons for

compelling conversion (XYJ, chapter 8). For activating the three fillets, Buddha

transmitted to Guanyin three fictionalized and punning spells (dhāranī, zhou)

named “the Golden, the Constrictive, and the Prohibitive , , ,” and these

fillets and spells would be used eventually by both Xuanzang and Guanyin on

Sun Wukong (chapter 14), the Bear Monster (chapters 16–17), and the Red Boy

(chapters 40–42) to induce submission to Buddhism.

According to the novel, all three of these characters are deviant animalistic

creatures who nonetheless find authentic religious deliverance. (The Red Boy of

the novel had a Bull Monster for a father and a female demon for a mother. Both

parents at the end of the episode also repented and went off to attain “the right

fruit” through religious self-cultivation.) What is even more interesting is that

the monkey figure’s taming by his fillet and the pain inflicted by the recited

dhāranī, as all readers of the novel must remember, literally traverses almost the

entire length of the narrative, from chapter 14 until Sun Wukong himself attains

apotheosis in Buddhahood in chapter 100. This protracted allegory of arduous

religious discipline leading to eventual enlightenment, I would argue, may well

have been rhetorically anticipated, if not actually inspired, in part by the gātha

(prosodically, a heptasyllabic quatrain) uttered by the Buddhist Zongyan to

instruct his penitent monkey. The third poetic line of Hong Mai’s story—“You

must believe your own mind is originally the Buddha ”—not only

asserts at once a didactic thesis rehearsed continuously in the later Ming novel,

but it also accords with a doctrinal emphasis much debated in Chan (Zen )

Buddhism (i.e., on the Buddha-nature as self or mind) and enthusiastically

embraced by subsequent Quanzhen ( ) Daoism that appeared around 1170

and drew considerably on Chan.43 Texts from both traditions, in turn, pervasively

shape and color the language of the full-length novel. Hong Mai’s story

resonates directly with the late Ming novel because a short tale of two score

sentences and a long narrative of roughly 600,000 characters both purport to

reveal through their plots why and how a Monkey King, already endowed with

supernal powers, would still need to attain Buddhahood.

In terms of chronology, Hong Mai’s line, in fact, directly echoes the first line

of a poetic composition by Zhang Boduan (982/4?–1082), styled Ziyang

Zhenren , who was the reputed founder of the southern lineage of

the Quanzhen Order. Zhang’s poetic composition titled “Ode to ‘This Mind is

Buddha’ ” begins with the line, “The Buddha is Mind and the Mind

is Buddha ,”44 which the XYJ author/redactor significantly

appropriated for a slightly modified ode that prefaces chapter 14 of the novel.

That fictional episode detailing Sun Wukong’s final submission to Buddhism and

his formal enlistment in the scripture pilgrimage just as significantly has been

capped by the titular couplet: “Mind Monkey returns to the Right. / The Six

Robbers vanish from sight , .” Because Zongyan’s instruction in

Hong Mai’s story is directed to a monkey and not a human being, one need but

recall the first two lines of the commentarial verse at the height of Sun Wukong’s

brawl in Heaven (JW, chapter 7; XYJ, p. 70) to perceive the concordant meaning

of mind and monkey threading the linguistic fabric of all three texts to render

them pieces cut from the same doctrinal cloth: “An ape’s body of Dao weds the

human mind. / Mind is a monkey—this meaning’s profound ,

.”

Dudbridge’s monograph of 1970 praised Wu Xiaoling for showing “with

admirable thoroughness that the Buddhist canon, which represents China’s

greatest single import from India, carries no more than fragmentary and

modified traces of the Rāmāyaṇa story and its leading figures, whether in rapid

summaries or in passing allusions. These give no grounds for an assumption that

the story was generally current in China.”45 Less than a decade after this verdict,

Ji Xianlin, who would produce eventually another Chinese translation of the

Indian epic, came to the exact opposite conclusion when he canvassed the same

Buddhist canon, because he became convinced that the minutely episodic

fragments of the epic pervading the sacred texts in Chinese were “egregiously

abundant .”46 After all, much of the huge Buddhist canon, even if not yet

enshrined in the magnitude of its final form, had already circulated in Chinese

society for at least a thousand years by the time of the 1592 novel. Currency of

the Indian epic might not have existed as a discrete textual entity, like the

Chronicles of the Three Kingdoms of official historiography that

prefigured its much later fictional counterpart, The Three Kingdoms , but

one can hardly assert that bits and pieces of allusions to the epic were unknown

to the Chinese public. Building on Ji’s specific labor on the Indian epic, no less

than a massive body of evidence indicating the profusion and adaptation of

Indian materials—motifs and themes in addition to specific linguistic echoes and

textual citations—in traditional Chinese literary writings and sacred scriptures,

Victor Mair’s 1989 essay might have settled a lengthy scholarly debate by

demonstrating that such materials indeed pile up parallels between the characters

of Hanumat and Sun Wukong.47 Even more compellingly and appropriately, his

study suggests—to this reader at least—that the evolution of the novelistic

monkey character was mediated through the lengthiest and most voluminous

process of textual translation and cultural exchange the world has ever known

and the impact that process had on Chinese writings and other cultural artifacts.

Our current knowledge of both process and impact is widening but far from

complete. Moreover, the particular relations between Hanumat and Sun Wukong

were complicated by the transmission of a story and its summation or allusion in

the diverse media of text or oral telling.48

It is the merit of Mair’s essay to show in copious detail how references to the

Indian epic had existed in Buddhist scriptures not just for Chinese readership but

also for that of other lands. In the course of an expanding eastward journey,

fragments, episodes, motifs, and themes of the Rāma story had found their way

into a huge area of Central, Northeast, and Southeast Asia, including

Tocharistan, Khotan, Tibet, Southeast Asia, and Japan, apart from China. To

mention just a few examples, the forty-sixth story in the Liudu ji jing ,

speciously named “Jātaka of an Unnamed King” (Anāmaka-rāja-jātaka), is

actually a Chinese translation of the Ṣaṭ-pārāmitā-saṃgraha-sūtra [?] by one

Seng Hui in as early as 251.49 Moreover, it paraphrases the entire epic story

in Chinese: “we have Rāma’s exile, Sītā’s abduction by Rāvaṇa, the duel of

Rāvaṇa with Jaṭāyus, the battle between Sugrīva and Vālin, the construction of a

bridge to Laṅkā, Hanumat’s curing of the fallen soldiers, Hanumat’s rescue of

Sītā, and a variant of Sītā’s ordeal by fire (agni-parīṣā).”50 Complementing this

text is the Shi shewang yuan (Tale of Causal Origins Concerning King

Ten Luxuries), translated in 472 by Kiṃkārya in collaboration with the Chinese

cleric Tanyao .51 It again presents numerous crucial incidents and episodes of

the Indian epic. Finally, the historical Xuanzang himself could not have been

ignorant of the poem, because his own “rendition of the Mahāvibhāṣā

commentary ” specifically considers the long epic’s 12,000

ślokas as all having been designed to elucidate the twin themes of Rāvaṇa’s
abduction of Princess Sītā and her rescue by Rāma.52

When the novel and the epic are juxtaposed, Journey (chapters 68–71) and
Rāmāyaṇa contain astonishing and sustained parallels in plot construction and
description of characters. The comparable features include the anguish caused by
the abducted loss of a spouse (Rāma’s grief for Sītā; the King of the Scarlet-
Purple Kingdom for his queen consort); the misery of the female prisoners as
depicted in facial dejection, unkempt and dirty clothing, disheveled hairdo,
absence of make-up, jewelry, and ornaments, and constant weeping (XYJ
chapter 70, vs. R V. 13: 18–33); and devising tokens of recognition (rings and
bracelets) by the different monkey figures to establish the kidnapped female’s
identity. When the novel’s Bodhisattva Guanyin providentially explains the
separation and reunion of the royal couple, she discloses the human king’s one
past offense while hunting when his arrow accidentally wounded the Bodhisattva
Great King Peacock. As another study astutely observes, “the motif of the hunter
who becomes separated from someone he loves as a result of karmic retribution
runs rampant through Indian literature,” and part of the XYJ story here thus
recalls not just the Rāmāyaṇa but also similar notions of “desire, yearning, and
separation” surfacing from the very beginning of the even longer epic
Mahābhārata.53

We may perhaps never be able to resolve the question of Sun Wukong’s origin
to every reader’s satisfaction, but every reader with a vested interest in this topic
seems also all too eager in choosing far-fetched details that would intimate
heroic “personality (xingge )” and ferocious “form or appearance (xingxiang

)” to fund, allegedly, the progressive literary development of Monkey’s
depiction or any random aspect associated with the evolving story of Xuanzang’s
pilgrimage. These details favored by sundry Chinese (e.g., Zheng Mingli) and
Japanese (e.g., Uchida Michio, Isobe Akira, Nakano Miyoko) scholars on the
ape are usually preserved in selected texts of the Buddhist canon and, as such,
are no more or less “historical” than the textualized representation of a Fujian
cult figure in story or ethnography. In any study of literary derivation or
influence, even the existence of a cult for a particular mythical figure—whether
Odysseus or Sun Wukong—cannot take priority over linguistic and textual
comparison. Nor can such study ignore how the eventual composition
appropriated the source materials—whether in discernible chunks or minute
fragments, whether in strict fidelity to borrowed language or with unfettered
freedom and creativity in its modification. We shall see, as we move through this
introduction, that one cannot fully understand the full-length XYJ without

appreciating its Indian and Buddhist as well as its native roots.

If the genealogy of Sun Wukong remains controversial, we have at least three

other texts of major import between the Kōzanji version and the hundred-chapter

narrative of the sixteenth century, texts which undoubtedly contributed to the

formation of the latter. First, there is a passage of a little less than 1,100

characters which is preserved in the scant surviving remnants of the Yongle

dadian (the encyclopedic collection compiled in 1403–08 under

commission of the Ming emperor Chengzu ). This passage constitutes a

remarkable parallel to portions of chapter 9 in the hundred-chapter narrative

(chapter 10 in the 1592 XYJ).54 Though the episodes concerning Tripitaka’s

genealogy and public debut receive much fuller treatment in the later work, the

essential sequences (i.e., the conversations between a fisherman named Zhang

Shao and a woodcutter named Li Ding, the transgressions of the Dragon King

and his conviction by the fortune-teller Yuan Shoucheng, and the dream

execution of the dragon by the prime minister Wei Zheng [580–643] in the midst

of a chess game with the emperor Taizong) and certain sentences and phrases

(e.g., the Dragon King’s address to the emperor: “Your majesty is the true

dragon, whereas I am only a false dragon”) are nearly identical in both accounts.

What is of greater interest here is that the Yongle dadian extract is listed under an

old source named Xiyouji, which may well have existed as a kind of Urtext for

all the dramatic and narrative works that are to follow. This text, unfortunately, is

now lost, and the lack of information on authorship, texts, and publisher

prohibits any conclusion other than the existence of a document or documents by

such a name two centuries before the circulation of the full-length novel.

Such a conclusion may certainly find further support in the Pak t’ongsa ŏnhae

(in Chinese, the Pu tongshi yanjie ), a Korean reader in colloquial

Chinese first printed probably some time in the mid-fifteenth century, though the

surviving version now preserved in the Kyu-chang-kak collection of the Seoul

University library has a preface which dates from 1677. This manual contains an

account of Tripitaka’s experience in the Chechi Guo (the Cart-Slow

Kingdom of chapters 44–46 in the novel), and, more significantly, “the picture of

ordinary people going out to buy popular stories in a book [which] confirms that

a Xiyouji was among those available.”55 There are, moreover, a number of

references to mythic regions and to various demons and gods (including Zhu

Bajie [translated in the present edition as Zhu Eight Rules], appointed

Janitor of the Altars at the end of the journey) which find echoes in subsequent

dramatic and narrative accounts.56 There is too little external evidence to allow

reconstructing a lost text, but internal analysis of this document, as Dudbridge

aptly observes, presents “evidence as a trend . . . that the Xiyouji story, now well

known in published form, was progressively assuming an accepted and less

variable form.”57

That form was finally established by the dramatic versions of the story, of

which fortunately we possess at least one more or less complete sample among

the six known stage works supposedly devoted to the XYJ theme. This is the

twenty-four-scene zaju titled Xiyouji , which was discovered in Japan and

first reprinted there in 1927–1928.58 The play was initially thought to be the lost

work of the same title by the Yuan playwright, Wu Changling . The

ascription, however, has been conclusively repudiated by Sun Kaidi, though

Sun’s own thesis that the play was written by Yang Jingxian (alternatively

Jingyan ) has been challenged also.59 Whoever the author was, the play is of

crucial importance, not only because of its unique length when compared with

other dramas of the genre, but also because of its content. It represents the fullest

embodiment of the major themes and figures of the XYJ story prior to the

hundred-chapter novel.

Acts 1–4 present at length the adventures of Xuanzang’s parents as well as the

abandonment and rescue of the young priest and his revenge of his father’s

murderers. Subsequent acts dramatize the royal commission of Xuanzang to

procure scriptures, the provision of a dragon-horse and guardian deities by

Guanyin for the scripture pilgrim, the mischievous adventures of the monkey

hero Sun Xingzhe, and his subsequent submission to Tripitaka as the monk’s

disciple and protector. The figure Zhu Bajie is also given extensive coverage

(acts 13–16). In this regard, the play is unique not only because Naṭa and not

Erlang subdues the monkey (unlike the case of the other Qitian dasheng plays),

but also because Erlang has to capture Zhu Bajie who, in Zhu’s own words, fears

no one except the deity’s small hound. Readers of the hundred-chapter XYJ will

readily recognize these themes when they reappear in the transformed context of

the developed narrative. In the case of Sun and Zhu’s relations to the divine

figures, they may also perceive how the genius of the late Ming author has

adapted his “source” to the logic of his massive masterpiece.

II TEXT AND AUTHORSHIP

If the antecedents to the sixteenth-century narrative are numerous and complex,
the vast family of texts and the different versions of The Journey to the West
itself, both abridged and unabridged, and the controversial puzzle of who might
have been the author or final redactor of the 1592 publication present no less
formidable areas of investigation to the serious student of this work. We are

fortunate once again to have the scholarship of Glen Dudbridge,60 whose earlier

informative examinations of the narrative’s textual history and related issues will

be supplemented by more recent discussions.

The principal part of the critical controversy surrounding the genesis of The

Journey to the West as a developed novel has to do with the relation of the

hundred-chapter version to two shorter versions. One of these is the Sanzang

chushen quanzhuan (The Complete Account of Sanzang’s Career),

commonly known as the Yang version because its putative author is Yang Zhihe

, probably a contemporary of many Fujian publishers at the end of the

sixteenth century but about whom little additional information is available. The

work, preserved at Oxford’s Bodleian Library and dated by Dudbridge to no

later than 1633, may well be the earliest copy. Its forty “chapter-like units”61

came together with the Dongyouji (Journey to the East), the Nanyouji (Journey

to the South), and the Beiyouji (Journey to the North), three tales of comparable

length which recount the directional voyages of various figures in myth and

legend. This group became familiar in a later Qing printing known as the Siyouji

zhuan (The Recorded Accounts of The Four Journeys) or Siyou

quanzhuan . Though the earliest extant reprint dates from 1730, its

printing format points back to a date almost a century earlier.

The other brief version of the Xiyouji is titled the Tang Sanzang Xiyou shini

(=e) zhuan (= ) (The Chronicle of Deliverances in Tripitaka

Tang’s Journey to the West), commonly known as the Zhu version after its

compiler, Zhu Dingchen of Canton. The extant version similar in length to

the Yang version is preserved in Taiwan, Japan, and the Library of Congress, but

all three copies lack title page and table of contents. The best guess places

publication at about 1595 or slightly later.62 The Zhu text has a distinctive long

chapter on the “Chen Guangrui story,” which tells of Xuanzang’s birth (he

was sent to his mother as a prenatal gift by one or another celestial deities) and

early adventures linked to the catastrophes that befall his parents. Abandoned at

birth by an abducted and then widowed mother, the infant drifted on a river until

a Buddhist monk rescued him. Upon reaching adulthood, Xuanzang avenged his

father’s murder and his mother’s disgrace at the hands of a pirate. That story,

modified, appears also as chapter 9 first in an abridged Qing edition of the XYJ

bearing the name of Xiyou zhengdao shu (A Book for the Illumination

of Dao by the Westward Journey), compiled by Huang Taihong and Wang

Xiangxu and dated by Dudbridge to around 1662.63 The chapter, however,

is missing in the earliest full-length version published in 1592, exactly seven

decades earlier, by the Nanjing publishing house named Shidetang (The

Hall of Generational Virtue) and in several other editions almost immediately
following which are based on this text.64 Since the title of the Zhu text is also
explicitly named in the heptasyllabic regulated poem which opens the hundred-
chapter novel (see the present translation’s chapter 1, where I have rendered its
last line as: “Read The Tale of Woes Dispelled on Journey West”), the critical
controversy centers on which version is the earliest.

Though scholars in the past have advocated the temporal priority of either the
Yang or the Zhu version, Dudbridge seems to me to have clearly established the
supremacy of the 1592 Shidetang text which, in his judgment, “promises to stand
as close to the original as any that survives.”65 Four decades after this declaration
that in itself also already possessed another four decades of antecedent
disputation, we have little new data or compelling interpretation that would
significantly modify, let alone overturn, his verdict. The debate over textual
priority, in the words of Andrew Plaks, had “seesawed back and forth,”66 going
through all three such possible options as (1) 1592, Zhu version, Yang version;
(2) Zhu version, Yang version, 1592; and (3) Yang version, 1592, and Zhu
version, but no combination has won consensus as the best. Perhaps it should be
remarked, parenthetically, that for the Chinese tradition, textual criticism is also
a venerable practice that harks back to high antiquity. Generally, however, there
are no criteria on which Chinese critics agree for determining what linguistic
phenomena are verifiable signs of changes that amount to deliberate
abbreviation, abridgment, or expansion.

Texts as late as vernacular Chinese fiction require attention to a new set of
social and material issues. Thus even the valuable work done by the late Liu
Ts’un-yan, Zheng Mingli, Li Shiren, and others reveals a predilection to construe
from word usages or modifications (abbreviation or lengthening of syntax,
reduction, addition, or change of vocabulary, correction, or corruption of
accepted prosodic convention) what passes as sufficient evidence of self-
conscious abridgment or fullness of expression. They seldom consider targeted
readership and its reading habits, competence in literacy assumed for publishers,
printers, and even typesetters, and market conditions of both publishing houses
and consumers correlated with time and urban conditions of production. That is
why they often assume that a text is entirely the product of a single creative
intelligence. More recent scholarship in textual criticism and in the sociology of
print culture in China and Europe, however, has steadily advanced the view that
a published text is formed by competing social forces and processes, even if a
single author was responsible for its genesis.67 A work like The Journey to the
West astounds and delights through its bountiful perfection as a finished novel,

but the analysis of its formative history and intertextual lineage, fragments and

citations from many sources, and commentarial insertions created or

appropriated for direct structuring into the novel will add to our wonderment at

the diverse and even conflicting features thus embodied. The novel, in sum,

represents a complex discursive heterology not disposed to easy assimilation or

classification.

After the People’s Republic of China was founded, the first standard modern

critical edition, on which the present translation is based, was published by

Beijing’s Zuojia chubanshe in 1954, using the 1592 edition as a

primary “basic ” text, with minor but requisite corrections, clarifications,

and collations established by comparison with six other abridged and unabridged

editions of The Journey to the West brought out in the Qing period.68 When

compared with its numerous literary antecedents, the 1592 hundred-chapter

novel may be seen at once as a culmination of a long and many-faceted tradition

as well as a creative synthesis and expansion of all the major figures and themes

associated with the story of Xuanzang’s westward journey. Though the narrative

far surpasses any of the previous dramatic or narrative accounts in scope and

length, the author/redactor also reveals a remarkably firm sense of structure and

an extraordinary capacity for organizing disparate materials in the presentation

of his massive tale. Certain details related to the development of plot and

characters evince thoughtful planning, preparation, and execution. The basic

outline of the narrative, as we have it in the modern edition, may be divided into

the following five sections:

1. (Chapters 1–7): The birth of Sun Wukong, his acquisition of immortality and magic powers under the
tutelage of Patriarch Subhodi, his invasion and disturbance of Heaven, and his final subjugation by
Buddha under the Mountain of Five Phases. Despite the elements of supernatural fantasy and magic
crowding all the episodes of the segment, the note sounded in the narrated experience emphasizes
consistently how the monkey figure is acquiring “the way of the human being.”

2. (Chapter 8): The Heavenly Council in which Buddha declares his intention to impart the Buddhist canon
to the Chinese, the journey of Guanyin to the land of the East to find the appropriate scripture pilgrim, and
her encounters with all of Xuanzang’s future disciples foreshadowing the lengthy pilgrimage in reverse
direction.

3. (Chapters 9–12): The background and birth of Xuanzang, his vengeance of his father’s murderers, Wei
Zheng’s execution of the Jing River Dragon, the journey of Tang Taizong to the underworld, his convening
of the Mass for the Dead, and the epiphany of Guanyin leading to the commission of Xuanzang as the
scripture pilgrim.

4. (Chapters 13–97): The journey itself, developed primarily through a long series of captures and releases
of the pilgrims by monsters, demons, animal spirits, and gods in disguise which form the bulk of the
eighty-one ordeals (nan ) preordained for the human pilgrim, Xuanzang.

5. (Chapters 98–100): The successful completion of the journey, the audience with Buddha, the return
with scriptures to Chang’an for an audience with the Tang emperor Taizong, and the pilgrims’ final
canonization by Buddha in the Western Paradise.

This book completely translates the modern edition of 1954, a collated text

and not a pristine duplication of the 1592 edition. Therefore, I have not followed

Dudbridge’s advice or the editorial practice of some of the more recent critical

Chinese editions to exclude chapter 9. For reasons stated elsewhere, I am

persuaded that the “Chen Guangrui story” is essential to the plot of the Xiyouji as

a whole, even though it was not part of the hundred-chapter novel’s earliest

known version.69

Despite the popularity which this narrative has apparently enjoyed since its

publication, the identity of its author, as in the case of such other major works of

Chinese fiction as the Jinpingmei (The Plum in the Golden Vase) and the

Fengshen yanyi, remains unclear. In his preface to the Shidetang edition, Chen

Yuanzhi emphasized that neither he, nor the Huayang Dongtian Zhuren

(Master of the Huanyang Grotto-Heaven) who checked this edition,

nor Tang Guanglu ,70 the publisher who “requested the preface” from

Chen, knew who the author was. Indeed, all the known individuals who had

anything to do with published editions of The Journey to the West in the Ming

dynasty were silent on this point. Several writers in the Qing period, however,

had already suggested that Wu Cheng’en (ca. 1500–1582) created the

narrative. But it was not until after the essay of 1923 by Hu Shi that scholars

widely accepted this theory. Wu, a native of the Shanyang district in the

prefecture of Huai’an (the modern Jiangsu ), was never more than a

minor official during his lifetime, having been selected as a Tribute Student

in 1544, and achieved a certain reputation as a poet and humorous writer.

Modern studies of Wu include an edition of his collected writings and a thorough

reconstruction of his life and career.71

The ascription of The Journey to the West to Wu is based primarily on an entry

in the Yiwenzhi (Bibliography of Books and Documents) section of the

Gazetteer of Huai’an Prefecture , compiled in the Ming Tianqi reign

period (1621–27), whereafter Wu’s name are listed the following works:

Sheyangji , 4 ce ,———juan ; preface to Chunqiu liezhuan ; Xiyouji
.72

An additional reference may be found in the Qianqingtang shumu , a

private Catalogue of the Thousand-Acre Hall completed at the end of the

seventeenth century,73 in which the title Xiyouji is again printed after the name of

Wu Cheng’en. The entry, however, is included within the section on

“Geography” ( ), in the division of “Histories” ( ).

Further listings noted by Hu Shi include the Huai’an Gazetteer and the

Shanyang District Gazetteer , compiled during the Kangxi (1662–

1722) and Tongzhi (1862–74) reigns of the Qing.74 Of the several writers in

this dynasty who affirmed Wu to be the author of the Xiyouji, the two most

frequently cited are Wu Yujin (1698–1773) and Ding Yan (1794–

1875), a noted textual scholar of the classics. In the Shanyang zhiyi

(Supplement to the Shanyang Gazetteer), Wu Yujin has the following

observation that merits a full quotation:

The Old Gazetteer of the Tianqi [1621–27] period listed the Master [i.e., Wu Cheng’en] as the ranking

writer of recent years whose works had been collected. He was said to be “a man of exceptional

intelligence and many talents who read most widely; able to compose poetry and prose at a stroke of the

brush, he also excelled in humor and satire . The several kinds of anecdotal records (zaji

) he produced brought him resounding fame at the time.” I did not know at first what sort of

books the anecdotal records were until I read the Huaixian wenmu (Catalog of Writings by

Huai Regional Worthies [i.e., j 19, 3 b]), where it was recorded that Xiyouji was authored by the Master. I

have discovered that Xiyouji, the old title of which was The Book for the Illumination of Dao, is so named

because its content was thought to be consonant with the Great Principle of the Golden Elixir .

Yu Daoyuan [i.e., Yu Ji , 1272–1348] of the Yuan dynasty had written a preface, in which he

claimed that this book was written by the Changchun Daoist Adept with the surname of Qiu [i.e., Qiu

Chuji , 1148–1227] at the beginning of the Yuan period. The regional gazetteer, however, claims

that it was by the hand of the Master. Since the Tianqi period is not far removed from the time of the

Master [Wu Cheng’en died ca. 1582 and the Tianqi reign began in 1621], that statement must have had

some basis . It might have meant to indicate that Changchun first composed this account

, and when it reached the Master later, he made it into a work of popular fiction (literally, a

popular exposition of a [different or fictive] meaning) , much as The Records

of the Three Kingdoms had originated from Chen Shou (d. 297), but the fiction (yanyi

) goes by the name of Luo Guanzhong (1315/18–1400?) to whom the Ming novel (oldest

complete printed edition dating to 1522) was attributed.75 The fact that the book [i.e., XYJ] contains a

great number of expressions peculiar to our local dialects should undoubtedly render it a product of

someone from the Huai district.76

All the points made in this passage by Wu, living a century later than the full-
length novel’s first publication, are still topics of debate today. They include:
descriptions of the putative author’s gifts and witty predilections; attributed
authorship to Wu Cheng’en of a work titled XYJ; Wu Yujin’s professed
familiarity with the Qing edition of Xiyou zhengdao shu containing the Yuan
scholar Yu Ji’s preface to XYJ and its asserted linkage with the religious ideas of
the Yuan Quanzhen Patriarch, Qiu Chuji; the suggested use of the Records of The
Three Kingdoms as the source in relation to Luo Guanzhong’s later novel as an
analogy for positing an earlier version of the XYJ authored by Qiu Chuji that
eventually became in Wu Cheng’en’s hands the hundred-chapter work of 1592;
and the abundance of local idioms and diction of the Huai region found in the
novel. Not one of these topics has been settled.

Take the criterion of the use of local idioms and dialects, for example.
Although the novel’s annotations of each critical edition subsequent to the 1954
version have benefited from further research and clarification, such editorial

labor has also made clear that the range of vernacular features exceeds that
defined by the Huai’an area alone.77 Even if only the idioms of a single region
were deployed consistently, that itself again cannot assume the illogical
inference that the author or redactor had to be also someone from that region.
The abundance of Shandong linguistic features in texts like Outlaws from the
Marshes or Plum in the Golden Vase cannot of itself prove that a Shandongese
wrote it any more than the excellence of the prose in Under Western Eyes would
furnish conclusive proof that Joseph Conrad was a native writer of English.

Since the appearance of Hu Shi’s essay, Wu Cheng’en’s authorship has been
widely accepted by scholars everywhere. This thesis was challenged by Glen
Dudbridge, who in turn followed the arguments advanced by Tanaka Iwao.
Essentially, the objection of Tanaka includes the additional following points:

1. The title Xiyouji listed in the Huai’an Gazetteer cannot be positively identified with the hundred-chapter
narrative.

2. There is no known precedent in Chinese literary history for equating anecdotal records (zaji) with works
of fiction.

3. Wu Cheng’en’s reputed excellence in humorous compositions is not positive evidence of authorship.

4. None of the known persons associated with the first publication of the hundred-chapter version had any
idea who the author was.

5. The famous iconoclast and literary critic Li Zhi (styled, Zhuowu 1527–1602), credited with
having edited such major works of literature as the Shuihuzhuan, the Xixiangji, and possibly the Xiyouji
with a full-blown commentary attached, made no mention of Wu Cheng’en’s authorship even in that last
work (which is disputed).78

The last of Tanaka’s five reasons for doubting the authorship of Wu Cheng’en
is ostensibly the most cogent, since Li’s alleged activities relative to his editing
of The Journey to the West could not have occurred more than twenty years after
Wu’s death. If Wu’s fame was as widespread as the Huai’an Gazetteer had
claimed, why did Li seem to be completely ignorant of it, especially when his
annotations of the narrative in many places clearly reflect his admiration for its
anonymous author?79

There can be more than one answer to this question. Tanaka’s inference—that
silence is ignorance, and that Li’s ignorance further casts doubt on Wu’s putative
achievements—is only one among several possibilities. It is merely an argument
ex silentio, for Li at no point made the specific assertion that Wu was not the
author. Moreover, if Wu Cheng’en was known to be fond of befriending some of
the Seven Masters of Later Times80—the group of literary theorists and writers
of late Ming who championed the imitation of the classics—one wonders if Li
Zhi would be inclined to suspect Wu’s hand in XYJ, or, even if he had known
Wu to be the author, to credit him publicly with the authorship. Li himself, we
must remember, was the declared foe and staunch critic of this literary

movement, and his own imprisonment and eventual suicide were caused in no

small way by his stubborn iconoclasm in views both political and literary.81 On

the other hand, the fact that Li was indeed silent should caution the critic from

too hasty an acceptance of Wu’s authorship.

The authenticity of the commentarial remarks in this edition attributed to Li

Zhi, in fact, has been questioned repeatedly, and most scholars today retain the

skepticism already voiced in the Qing. Nonetheless, the importance of the

remarks themselves, usually appearing in “end-of-chapter overall commentary

,” ought not again to be dismissed easily, because their content—

consistently sardonic and witty enough to recall aspects of Li’s rhetoric and style

—hardly hews to the line of later criticism that tends to exalt either Neo-

Confucianism or Quanzhen Daoism, a conscientiously syncretistic blend of Chan

Buddhist and Daoist ideas advocated by the lineage. Without thoroughly

studying the Li edition, comparing it with his other fictional and dramatic

commentaries along with later Ming-Qing editions of XYJ, the issue of

authenticity cannot be settled.

With regard to the reputation of Wu Cheng’en as a humorist, it is certainly

true that that characteristic alone cannot establish Wu as the author. Nor, of

course, should this trait be ignored, since the narrative is rich comedy and satire.

Another equally significant aspect of Wu’s character which may link him to The

Journey to the West is his self-declared predilection for the marvelous, the

exotic, and the supramundane in literature. In the Yudingzhi xu , a

preface to a group of stories, now lost, which he wrote on one of the legendary

sage kings of Chinese antiquity, Wu said:

I was very fond of strange stories when I was a child. In my village-school days, I used to buy stealthily

popular novels and historical recitals. Fearing that my father and my teacher might punish me for this and

rob me of these treasures, I carefully hid them in secret places where I could enjoy them unmolested. As I

grew older, my love for strange stories became even stronger, and I learned of things stranger than what I

had read in my childhood. When I was in my thirties, my memory was full of these stories accumulated

through years of eager seeking. I have always admired such writers of the Tang Dynasty as Tuan Ch’êng-

shih [Duan Chengshi , author of the Youyang zazu ] and Niu Sheng-ju [Niu Sengru

, author of the Xuanguai lu ], who wrote short stories so excellent in portrayal of men and

description of things. I often had the ambition to write a book (of stories) which might be compared with

theirs. But I was too lazy to write, and as my laziness persisted, I gradually forgot most of the stories

which I had learned. Now only these few stories, less than a score, have survived and have so successfully

battled against my laziness that they are at last written down. Hence this Book of Monsters. I have

sometimes laughingly said to myself that it is not I who have found these ghosts and monsters, but they,

the monstrosities themselves, which have found me! . . . Although my book is called a book of monsters

[literally, zhiguai ], it is not devoted to provide illumination for ghosts: it also records the strange

things of the human world and sometimes conveys a little bit of moral lesson.82

That the author of the hundred-chapter novel could have been familiar with
the contents of the Youyang zazu may be seen from the references to the Three

Worms in chapter 15 and Wu Gang in chapter 22. The book thus mentioned,
however, is more than simply an anthology of fabulous tales of the ninth-century
Tang era. Duan Chengshi (c. 800–863), in the words of the late Edward H.
Schafer, an authority on Tang manifold culture both native and imported, was a
“bibliophile, word-fancier, and collector of curiosa,” and the book Duan
compiled and wrote

collected data on every subject, especially information that was outside the realm of common knowledge
—such as the use of wooden traps to catch elephants in some foreign land, knowledge that he picked up
from a Cantonese physician who had it from a foreign ship captain. Indeed, he sought new knowledge far
outside the walls of his library and was noted for his rather scandalous consorting with vagabonds, maid-
servants, and foreigners, and even counted “Romans” (Anatolians? Syrians?) and Indians among his
informants. Much of the data he collected in this way was linguistic, and it would not be an exaggeration
to characterize him as a pioneering field linguist. He also reported on foreign scripts and book-styles; he
knew imported incenses and perfumes, such as gum guggul, ambergris, and balm of Gilead—as well as
their commercial names in exotic languages—and the names and characteristics of foreign medicinal herbs
and garden flowers. He collected reports on the unseen or supernal worlds from persons who claimed
expert knowledge of such places; . . . But he was no mere recorder: he often voices his own doubts about
the reliability of reports he has received and sometimes goes to considerable pains to check their accuracy
with supposed witnesses. For this and other reasons the Yu-yang tsa-tsu is no mere mindless collectanea—
it has very much the personal stamp of its author, an open-minded book-lover not bound by books.83

Schafer’s meticulous description of the Tang anthology ironically casts further
doubt on Wu’s authorship of XYJ, for not many of the elements mentioned, or
even allusions to or verbal echoes of them, have turned up in XYJ. The novel
itself does not bear up Wu’s professed fondness for Duan’s title. The near-
century-long debate on the authorship of this Chinese masterpiece has yet to
resolve this fundamental problem. Given the magnitude, length, and complexity
of the hundred-chapter novel, thorough examination and analysis of what might
have been the materials alluded to and, even more important, made use of by the
actual text itself become the indispensable task of any serious interpreter of a
literary document like XYJ. The nature and sources (to the extent that they are
discoverable) of the document’s language and rhetoric provide the nonnegotiable
basis for a considered judgment on what that document is about. The results of
such labor should then be compared and correlated with the characteristics and
discernible features of any known writings of a person nominated for putative
authorship. How this fundamental problem has been treated in the history of
XYJ’s reception, however, clearly reveals the difference dividing premodern
readers and the early twentieth-century scholars like Hu Shi and Lu Xun.
Whereas the Qing readers were fascinated by much of the content and allegorical
rhetoric of the novel’s text, the modern scholars seemed far more eager to find a
person as the likely authorial candidate. Before the end of this section of this
introduction, therefore, it is necessary to take up briefly the novel’s reception by

two of its premodern readers (the second one admittedly putative and
controversial) before one can entertain the question (in the last two parts of the
introduction) of whether the novel’s aim and message coincide with Wu
Cheng’en’s description of his now lost book of stories written to record “the
strange things of the human world and sometimes and . . . a little bit of moral
lesson.”

The earliest moral lesson that has surfaced in XYJ, as far as the readers are
concerned, has to be that articulated in the preface of the Shidetang edition by
one Chen Yuanzhi. According to him,

We do not know who wrote the book, Journey to the West. Some claimed that it originated from the

domain of a prince’s household; others, from the likes of the “Eight Squires ( )”;84 still others,

that a prince himself created it. When I look at its meaning, it appears to be a champion of reckless humor,

a composition of overflowing chatter. There used to be a preface [? ],85 but it did not record the

name of its author. Could it be on account of the possible offense caused by such vulgar language? Its

narration takes up monkey, a monkey that is taken to be the spirit of the heart-and-mind ( ). The

horse: the horse is taken to be the galloping of the will ( ). The name Bajie: eight is the number of

things prohibited, so that it can be taken as the wood phase of the liver’s pneumatic energy ( ).

Sand: flowing sand, that is to be taken as the water phase of the kidney’s pneumatic energy ( ).

As for Tripitaka [Sanzang , originally the Buddhist nomenclature for the triple canon and also an

honorary title conferred on the scripture pilgrim of both history and this novel], it refers to the three

storages that hoard viscerally (using [articulated as cang when used as a verb] to pun on simultaneously

zang , treasury, storehouse, and , the viscera) the spirit, the sound, and the pneumatic energy that

[would enable one to become] the lord of a citadel ( ). Demons: demons are taken as the barriers

(zhang , Skt., māra) of the mouth, the ears, the nose, the tongue, the body, the will, the fears, the

contradictions, and the fantasies. That is the reason why demons are born of the mind, and they are also

subdued by the mind. That is the reason for subduing the mind in order to subdue demons, and for

subduing demons to return to principle. Returning to principle is to revert back to the primal beginning (

), which is the mind without anything more to be subdued. This indeed is how the Dao is

accomplished and plainly allegorized in this book ( )!86

This passage (of only a few sentences in the original Chinese) conveys what
sort of impression the reading of the novelistic text had made on this author of a
preface written for the earliest known edition of the hundred-chapter novel. The
esoteric terminologies coming into view are first of all consistent with a
communal milieu for the formation of a text like XYJ, if the “eight squires”
indeed allude to some group like the one mentioned by Ge Hong and King
Huainan. The latter himself, as we have pointed out in note 84, was no stranger
to cultic ritualists or their writings and practices. In addition, Chen Yuanzhi ends
the section not merely with a blunt use of the term “allegory,” but also provides
unmistakable clues as to what sort of an allegory the book purports to have
fashioned by noting some of its constitutive diction and themes.

The five pilgrims as the novel’s central figures, for example, are transformed
in Chen’s reading at once into multiple metaphors: not only the monkey and the

horse are already identified as “The Monkey of the Mind and the Horse of the

Will ,” a pair of figurative terms that populate countless texts of both

Buddhism and Daoism, but also the delinquent Pig, given the religious nickname

Bajie [Eight Rules or Prohibitions] at his conversion in the novel, is

furthered troped as “the wood phase of the liver’s pneumatic energy.” Chen’s

interpretation, in fact, highlights the chain of metaphoric correlation of bodily or

somatic features and ingredients with cosmological processes (e.g., wood and

water, two of the Five Phases or wuxing ) pervading the universe and

microcosmically the whole of the human body. As will be shown in further detail

in part IV of this introduction, such a use of correlation specifically invokes and

validates the language and technique of physiological or internal alchemy

(neidan ) advocated and practiced by many of the Quanzhen adepts. The

allusion to the mental genesis of “demons ” and their “subduing or suppression

” also by the mind (xin) replicates the doctrinal emphasis of Chan Buddhism

and its adaptation by Quanzhen discourse that, in line with the tenets of Daoist

writings at large, envisages gods and demons residing in one’s body. The third

point about Chen’s preface, moreover, directly anticipates Wu Yujin’s

observation cited earlier, for both pieces of writing mutually strengthen the

novel’s essential linkage to Quanzhen Daoism by referring to a preface attributed

to Yu Ji, a document unique to the 1662 edition of the novel titled Xiyou

zhengdaoshu that also identifies the Yuan Daoist and alchemist Qiu Chuji, alias

(style or hao) Changchun Zhenren, as the XYJ’s author. Qiu, after all, was the

second disciple of Wang Chongyang, the founding patriarch of the Quanzhen

Order.

Yu Ji of this second preface of the novel, printed some seventy years later than

the known first edition, was an erudite scholar flourishing in 1272–1348. His

composition claims that he was given the manuscript by the Daoist Purple Jade

, who further claimed that it was written by the Perfected Lord Qiu

Changchun . Upon reading it, says Yu,

I saw that what the book records are the events of acquiring scriptures by Xuanzang, the Tang Master of
the Law. Now scripture acquisition did not begin in the Tang, for it existed since the eras of the Han to the
Liang, but the activities by Xuanzang of the Tang were the most illustrious. His endurance of a long and
dangerous journey and his experiences of immense difficulty, thoroughly recounted in Emperor Taizong’s
“Preface to the Holy Religion,” require no further rehearsal by posterity. As I personally perceive the
Perfected Lord’s purpose, what is said may regard Xuanzang, but its meaning does not concern Xuanzang.
Scripture acquisition is recorded, but the intent is actually not about acquiring scripture, for [that event] is
borrowed only to indicate or symbolize (yu ) the Great Way (da Dao ). Monkey, horse, metal, and

wood are the yin-yang aspects of our body; ghost, goblin, monster, and demon are also the demonic
hindrances (mozhang ) of our human life. Although the book is exceedingly strange, expending

undoubtedly several hundred thousand words [an astonishingly accurate word count], but its general
importance may be stated in one sentence: it is only about the retrieving or releasing one’s mind (

). For whether we folks act like demons and become Buddha are all dependent on this mind.

Released, this mind becomes the erroneous mind. When the erroneous mind is aroused, it can become so
demonic that there is no place that its movement and transformation cannot reach. An example of this is
when the Mind Monkey calls himself a king, a sage, to disturb greatly the Celestial Palace. When this
mind is retrieved, it will be the true mind, and once the true mind appears, it can extinguish demons.
Similarly, there is no place that its movement and transformation cannot reach. An example of this is when
the Mind Monkey subdue[s] monsters and bind[s] fiends so as to illumine the Buddha’s fruit.87

As can be seen readily from the citation, Yu’s reading of the novel plainly

complements the emphasis of Chen Yuanzhi. The thrust of the entire novel,

according to Yu, is about the control and liberation of the mind, an interpretation

that accords with Chan Buddhism—especially its so-called Southern Lineage (

)—and the entire Quanzhen tradition from its founding patriarchs of the

Song-Yuan era to the Qing and present-day communities. Despite the putative

author’s scholarly reputation, Yu Ji’s preface is controversial, as the novel’s

critics past and present have severe doubts about its authenticity. They ask why it

did not turn up until seven decades later in a Qing printed edition of the novel.

Many surmise that it might have been a forged document inserted into the Qing

edition. If the authorship of the preface is questionable, Yu’s account of how he

learned of the Quanzhen patriarch Qiu Chuji as the author of XYJ is thus also

suspect.

On the other hand, the historical Yu Ji was active in the Daoist communities of

his time, counting among his friends quite a few members of the major lineages

of Daoism (Quanzhen, Zhengyi, Maoshan, and Zhendadao Jiao). As Liu Ts’un-

yan has shown, Yu Ji also wrote a discerning and knowledgeable preface to a

group of miscellaneous writings (some prose, poems, and ritual texts) titled

Minghe yuyin (The crying crane’s lingering sounds) now preserved in

DZ 744–45. The collection actually was compiled by an itinerant Daoist named

Peng Zhizhong , but one section in the collection details Yu Ji’s friendship

and happy exchanges of poems with one Feng Zunshi (Honored Master

Feng), about whose activities Yu wrote the preface.88

Yu Ji’s allegation of the Yuan Daoist Qiu Chuji as the original author of XYJ

has met also stiff resistance. What complicates matters is the fact that, as noted

previously, the Qing scholar Wu Yujin in “The Supplement to the Shanyang

Gazetteer” has also credited Qiu with a book of exactly the same name of

Xiyouji, or literally in its full form, The Record of the Westward Journey by the

Perfected Man of Enduring Spring, Changchun zhenren Xiyouji .

This book, however, is no help at all to solve the mystery of the novel’s origin,

since readers will discover at once that it concerns topics of travel and

geography. With a preface that addresses Qiu as “Father Teacher, fushi ,” the

book actually narrates at one point the circumstance of Qiu’s death. For these

reasons, most scholars firmly regard the book’s author as likely one of Qiu’s

principal disciples, Li Zhichang , who purported to record Qiu’s lengthy

and arduous journey in 1221–1224 from Beijing to Genghis Khan’s court in

Karakorum in the Mongol heartland. Past seventy years old then, Qiu led some

eighteen of his disciples on this visit.89 Despite the different nature of this XYJ,

as Andrew Plaks points out, there is one other reference found in Qiu’s corpora

that attributes to the patriarch one more work by the same name so as to “reveal

the true scriptures in the Western Heaven , , .”90 As

any reader of Qiu’s gathered religious writings in both prose and poetry will

readily testify, all of his writings are about the ritual precepts and practices of

Quanzhen Daoism. In sum, Qiu’s association with the novel XYJ as we know it

in the Shidetang version, precisely because of the novelistic use of identifiable

rhetoric and terminologies from religious sources, cannot be dismissed out of

hand.

Finally, one strong argument against a Yuan origin of the novel ostensibly

stems from a different kind of textual evidence, not the massive presence of

religious topoi and rhetoric, but the novel’s use of official and bureaucratic titles

that began only in the Ming. If Qiu were granted the novel’s authorship, so this

argument goes, how could a Yuan verbal artifact employ nomenclatures not

known until centuries later? Against this seemingly irrefutable thesis,

contemporary readers loyal to the Yuan and Quanzhen Sitz-im-Leben for the

text’s initial production have countered with the argument that the hundred-

chapter novel, though its essential form and content emerged in the Yuan, might

have been modified in subsequent production. Later editions of the Ming also

seem to display here and there the titles of officials that were in use only in the

Qing. Are we then to assume a Qing authorship for the Ming novel?91

In summary, this vexing dispute over the novel’s authorship, similar to that on

the priority of its textual versions, has also seesawed back and forth for nearly a

century without resolution. We now know that there exist several texts from the

Yuan to the Ming with the name “The Record of the Westward Journey or

Xiyouji.” The extant Yuan text is not a novel at all, but its firm association with

Qiu Chuji, a Yuan Daoist and the second patriarch of the Quanzhen lineage,

prods us to wonder whether Qiu had connection to some other texts with the

same or a similar name, now lost, that recount the evolving story about

Xuanzang’s pilgrimage. Apart from a fully formed drama of twenty-four scenes

also titled XYJ, a local prefectural gazetteer credits a minor late Ming official

with a book or composition by the name of XYJ, but there is no information on

what sort of a work that is. Most Chinese scholars in the early decades of the

twentieth century since Hu Shi have embraced Wu Cheng’en as the most likely

author of the first printed, full-length version of the novel. In more recent

decades, doubts about Wu’s authorship are heard with increasing frequency, and

much of this “revisionist” critique of Hu’s thesis arises from readers’ escalating

attention to the actual linguistic content and rhetorical affinities of the fiction

text that are difficult to reconcile or harmonize with the content in Wu

Cheng’en’s known writings.92

This last problem has persuaded two of the most astute scholars of traditional

Chinese fiction outside of China to withhold full support for Wu’s authorship.

After a comprehensive survey on aspects of the novel manifestly related to

Quanzhen Daoism, the late Professor Liu Ts’un-yan of Australia, though

constrained to deny the novel’s initial authorship to Qiu Chuji, nonetheless

plainly asserted the “high possibility” of a Quanzhen version of the narrative

existing prior to the 1592 edition, written by someone belonging to that same

religious community “ .”93 He does not rule out a Ming

date for the author or final redactor, but he is less certain about late-Ming

literati’s familiarity with some of the subtle and hidden allusions in Quenzhen

writings, an estimation that may not be entirely accurate. In his equally long and

erudite chapter on this novel, probing with special acuity its religious and

philosophical rhetoric, Professor Andrew Plaks of the United States has

entertained “a remote possibility” of “a prototype” for the novel as “a Yuan (or

even a late Sung) composition,” but his chapter’s final thesis considers the novel,

ex-emplified by the Shidetang and other editions, to be “essentially a product of

the sixteenth-century intellectual milieu.”94 The conclusion reached by these two

specialists may indicate scholarly open-mindedness or cautious equivocation

that, paradoxically, may further validate the insight of someone like Wu Yujin

cited earlier. To argue for a possible Yuan prototype or some version of XYJ that

eventually was brought to its completed form in the 1592 printed version by a

nameless author or final redactor—is this not analogous indeed to that Qing

reader’s interesting use of the transformation of official history (that is, the Three

Kingdoms) into fiction by different hands of author and redactors to gloss his

understanding of the formative process for the hundred-chapter Xiyouji?

III THE USES AND SOURCES OF POETRY

Unlike any typical Western work of fiction since the Renaissance, The Journey
to the West is made up of prose heavily interlaced with verse of many varieties
and lengths. Incorporation of poetry into prose narration is not, of course, unique
to Chinese vernacular fiction. For distant Western parallels, one may point to the
early satiric fragments of Menippus, the later Consolation of Philosophy by

Boethius, a work like Aucassin and Nicolette, and the writings of Bunyan and

Rabelais. In Chinese literature, however, this form of writing has enjoyed more

sophisticated and artful cultivation, for the use of poetry to serve specific literary

functions is already a characteristic of Tang fiction and drama.95 In such

narrative works as the Yingyingzhuan and the Songyue jianü ,

poems advance the action by revealing the emotional conditions of the

characters, or serve as set pieces of dramatic dialogue, a feature that later

dramatic literature develops extensively. The growing popularity of Buddhist

literatures and the development of religious prosimetric writings called

transformational texts (bianwen ) further motivated the employment of

narrative, descriptive, and didactic verse in prose fiction.

No reader of the Dazhidu lun or the Vimalakīrti-nirdeśa sūtra, to pick

two examples at random, can fail to perceive that characteristic which Maurice

Winternitz has called “an old form of Buddhist composition”: namely, that of

“expressing an idea first in prose and then garbing it in verse, or [of]

commencing the presentation of a doctrine in prose and then continuing it in

verse.”96 Nor can that reader fail to notice, when he or she turns from the

Buddhist canon to the transformational texts, how the addition of poetry to

summarize or develop the prose has become one of the defining features of this

popular form of writing.

Since the discovery of these bianwen texts in the caves of Dunhuang in 1899,

their historical basis is well known. Dating from the eighth and ninth centuries,

many of the texts took as their subject the Leben und Treiben of Buddhist saints

and heroes, though many other secular stories dealt with persons and events

from Chinese legend or history as well. The origin of the religious bianwen has

been traced to the evangelism of Buddhist monks, who sought to accommodate

their more abstruse doctrines to a popular audience through storytelling, a

practice for which the Buddha himself might be said to have provided the

exemplary precedent.97 Not incomparable to some of the patristic and medieval

epic paraphrases of biblical themes in the West (e.g., the Libri Evangeliorum IV

of Juvencus, the Carmen Paschale of Sedulius, the anonymous but massive Old

Saxon Heliand, and the De Vita et Gestis Christi of Jacobus Bonus), these

bianwen consisted of imaginative elaborations and expansions of individual

episodes in a Buddhist sūtra, with events and persons freely altered or added.

Alternating between short sections of semiliterary prose and lengthier sections

composed mainly of the penta- or heptasyllabic poetic line, the bianwen may

amplify a relatively short unit (about one or two hundred characters) of the

Saddharma-puṇḍarīka sūtra or the Vimala-kīrti-nirdeśa sūtra into a narrative of